
GopyiightN^_ 



COPlTilGIIT DEPOSIT. 



EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 



VOLUME I 



EDUCATIONAL 
PROBLEMS 



BY 



G. STANLEY HALL, Ph.D., LL.D. 

PRESIDENT OF CLARK UNIVERSITY AND PROFESSOR OF 
PSYCHOLOGY AND PEDAGOGY 



VOLUME I 




NEW YORK AND LONDON 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 

1911 



< 






Copyright, 191 i, by 
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 



Pul)lished May, 1911 



Printed in the United States of America 



©CI.A2S6789.- 



INTRODUCTION 



In looking over the past twenty-five years, it seems hardly 
too much to say that educational thought has broadened more 
in the past five, and certainly ten, years than in the twenty 
that preceded. At the beginning of the period the schools 
were stagnant, the teachers complacent, and the work formal 
and mechanical. The great movement started by Horace 
Mann had spent its force. Pedagogy was despised in aca- 
demic circles (the word suggesting pettifogging to one don 
in an Atlantic Monthly contribution). Child study was un- 
known. Psychology of all kinds had no recognition. The 
philosophy of education consisted chiefly of a few sonorous 
metaphysical platitudes which mystified far more than they 
enlightened. Those who brought lessons from abroad were 
told that American schools must be kept American, and their 
voice was almost like that of those who cry in the wilderness. 
Superintendent Philbrick publicly challenged all comers to 
find any essential imperfection in the schools of Boston, and 
State Superintendent Dickinson had a philosophy that was 
remarkably complete, defining everything needful in four 
blackboards full, on which every large question which teachers 
had a right to ask was answered by carefully worded for- 
mula. Dr. W. T. Harris was rapidly acquiring the almost 
papal authority which he later wielded among the leaders, 
now the " old guard." Educational journals of that period 
were timid, provincial, and are now utterly unreadable. The 
N. E. A. under the Bicknell regime was being very rapidly 
pushed to its later prominence as a pedagogic sanhedrin. 
The term " and pedagogy " appended to my title as Professor 
of Psychology at the Johns Hopkins in 1884 was, I think, 
the second in the country. Professor Payne, of Michigan, 
preceding, to be attached to any chair in any considerable 



vi INTRODUCTION 

college or university, and was regarded by nearly all my 
friends as a handicap. President Eliot's introduction of my 
first Boston course (Chapter XIV, Vol. II, page 241) was 
very typical of the attitude even of those who were advanced. 
I still have a letter from a president of a now leading state 
university canceling my appointment on his faculty upon my 
return from Germany, because he deemed it unsafe to dis- 
cuss the fundamental principles of education upon which our 
system was based, as he thought I would do it, because this 
would be " unsettling." Another leading orthodox Eastern 
college president declared that he did not propose to send his 
philosophy, theology, religion, or basal educational convictions 
to any psychological laboratory or any psychologist to be 
tested. But I forbear (for it would be almost cruel to those 
still living, some of whom have changed for the better, doubt- 
less, more than I have) to cite further from my memoranda 
of these early days. It was a kind of warfare for years, 
sometimes merry, sometimes in earnest, with scars which vet- 
erans on the winning side may be pardoned for feeling some 
pride in showing, but had now better ignore and forget, so 
altered is everything. Educational domains, once denied, then 
ridiculed, are now represented by experts devoting all their 
time to each in many of our leading universities. Such topics 
are school hygiene, the history of education, industrial train- 
ing of many kinds, plays and playgrounds, subnormality, re- 
ligious and moral education, art. Meanwhile, our conception 
of education has broadened far beyond the confines of the 
school and we are realizing that it is as wide as life itself 
and that the highest standpoint from which any human insti- 
tution can be judged is a pedagogic or pragmatic one. Child 
study, once ridiculed and despised, has spread to every highly 
civilized land and is represented by academic chairs and jour- 
nals galore and has become the chief stone of the corner. In- 
stead of the child being for the sake of the school, we have 
had a Copernican revolution, and now the school, including its 
buildings, all its matter and method, revolve about the child, 
whose nature and needs supply the norm for everything. 
Those who know what has been done in this domain already 
speak with an authority which is recognized as is no other. 
Yet, despite all this progress, our school system is yet in 



INTRODUCTION vii 

the gristle, and comparatively little of its history can be writ- 
ten yet because the best of it has not yet been made. Edu- 
cation is still rutty, mechanical, and the system is, on the 
whole, poorly served by those who teach, admirable as the 
best are. Our schools are financially poorly supported, despite 
the $300,000,000 spent a year, and need and must have a far 
larger budget. So, too, notwithstanding its rapid growth, 
our school system has not yet transcended the tadpole stage, 
and the next twenty-five years ought to — and I am optimist 
enough to believe they will — show vastly accelerated prog- 
ress, so that the transformations of the past quarter of a 
century will appear small beside those of the next quarter, 
and the per capita sum spent upon each child will be greatly 
augmented. There will be improvement in the professional 
standing of teachers, in their character, ability, and training, 
and many transformations, very likely radical, which it is 
impossible to forecast, are sure to occur. The many and 
grave faults that now limit the usefulness and threaten the 
future of our system must be removed at whatever cost, for 
our stability, progress, and standing among the nations of the 
world, which are now gravely imperiled. Our destiny is at 
stake. Thus, America to-day needs a new educational dis- 
pensation. Our system is not fulfilling the purpose for which 
our fathers established it, nor is it molding men as it did in 
older days when it was simpler and cheaper, and in these 
volumes I have tried to point out in some detail, as best I 
could, why, as well as to suggest the needed cures as I see 
them. 

Let us look at the two extremes of good and had and 
then ask which we are nearest. I. Ideal teaching focuses in 
suggestion. The more interest on the child's part, the nearer 
the nascent period for the topic, the more genius and ability, 
the lighter may the suggestion be and the less method is 
necessary to touch off the innate springs, the less repetition 
is necessary and the more sure and permanent the acquisi- 
tion. Such teaching at the right psychological moment is, 
like a hint to the wise, sufficient. Biographies and religion 
abound with instances where a chance word or event, or per- 
haps the unconscious influence of a single teacher or acquaint- 
ance, has changed the whole current of life. This is the right 



viii INTRODUCTION 

seed upon good soil, fittest if sown in its proper season. 
Moreover, in every normal child at about every moment of 
its life there is some zest or curiosity just ripe for impregna- 
tion with information and suggestion, which will be instantly 
and forever assimilated with no need of explanation or re- 
view, which, indeed, these would positively injure, because 
they would interfere with the complete absorption of knowl- 
edge and keep it nearer the memory surfaces. The pedagogic 
world knows little of what might, could, and should happen 
if a child's soul were thus constantly fructified by the most 
and the best that an ever-present mentor, charged with love 
and knowledge and sagely observant of times and seasons in 
making the most of every opportunity, could do. This is the 
ideal education, and though it may never be fully realized, it 
should be ever kept in mind and constantly approximated. 
The school is to shorten the stages by which the child repeats 
the history of the race. Perhaps none of these essential 
stages should be entirely omitted for the fullest and most 
humanistic culture. Some of them need to reverberate only 
faintly and but once to do their great work of stimulus. 
Some need to be touched only in the lightest way. Often 
even the germs of the sins and errors of all the past must 
be made to glow up for a moment, for the vestiges of evil 
are thus burned out, while at the same time their conflagra- 
tion alone can arouse the next highest powers which control 
or, it may be, repress them. Others need to be betoned with 
emphasis lest something vital, that is part of man's precious 
legacy from, his immemorial past, be lost to life, for the best 
in us is often only the worst sublimated and transfigured. 

II. On the other hand, in an organized system of education 
we have, of course, to depart point by point from this ideal, 
so that we cannot afford to forget that by an iron law, like 
that of gravity itself, schools constantly tend to approximate 
the worst. What is this? Apathetic, unwilling pupils, coerced 
to attend ; topics which invoke no alluring interest in the soul 
and so constantly tend to lapse without incessant repetition 
and mechanical drill; themes taught out of season and those 
where method ever tends to predominate over matter and 
content; everything out of its proper age, either too early or 
late or at the wrong season of the year or time of day; sex 



INTRODUCTION ix 

differences ignored; individuality obliterated in the monoto- 
nous mass, and the law of average made supreme; skill and 
knowledge stressed that have no value for later life and will 
be lost when school is over; prim, formal conventional vir- 
tues put in place of essential personal morality; no attention 
paid to that function of life which is at the dawn of puberty 
the most dominant of all interests, hungriest for information 
and capable of assimilating condensed extracts of more that 
is needful for right conduct in life than any other function 
of human nature, little or nothing helpful in bread winning, 
which is the first duty of man, conditioning his value in mod- 
ern life; incessant recitation and examination because the 
teacher, with only too much justice, feels that without them 
everything gained may slip away forever because it strikes 
no root; the soul-breaking drudgery of marking, because so 
little is known of the real life and powers of the child that 
each one has to be judged merely by this factitious and super- 
ficial test; so that hosts of children are robbed of their in- 
alienable right to be in that grade and class where they can 
get most and are sentenced to the treadmill of repeating a sub- 
ject half or sixty or seventy per cent known already; no time 
or agency to find the individual proprium of each child, on 
the detection of and emphasis on which it will depend whether 
or not he ever does anything worth while, especially if he 
has, as most do have, capacities above the average in some 
direction; just half those who should be in the system, out 
of it, day by day; school keeping half the week days in the 
year; poorly paid and trained teachers, longing and ready to 
do better on the first chance and leaving so fast that some 
fifth of our educational army is every year composed of raw 
recruits ; shoals of foreigners landing on our shores each year 
whose children have to be taught the very elementary things 
of life in this country; school boards, the members of which 
are, on the whole, not more than half competent, and with 
more interest in their own personal ambitions than in the 
duty of public service; women, because their services can be 
procured for a less fee, where men should be ; teaching largely 
reduced to lesson setting and hearing ; text-books all-dominant, 
usurping the place of personal inculcation; occasional corrup- 
tion; wastefulness; unfit teachers kept in their places by un- 



X INTRODUCTION 

worthy influences; uniformity of goal; laws by the score 
enacted each year, but many of them unenforced and unen- 
forceable ; a censorship placed on all within the system who 
may be moved to speak out their minds and point out defects, 
and grandiose eulogies of the system on all public occasions by 
those who may be and are responsible for it; juvenile crime 
and vice abounding; bad eyes, teeth, and health generally, 
increasing up the grades; everything slack and at low pres- 
sure ; the home abandoning its functions to the school, which 
latter excuses itself by charging its own defects and short- 
comings back upon the home; the church and all religious 
influences banished from the school, because, forsooth, its 
representatives cannot agree on what is best and this is there- 
fore the easiest way; moral and industrial education, the two 
chief problems and needs to-day throughout the educational 
world, regarded as fads and frills; innovations suspected; 
nearly all I have described in the last chapter on Civics ig- 
nored; a persistent fringe of illiteracy, children leaving, on 
the average, at the end of the sixth when the bill of fare 
provides twelve courses — this is the nadir. 

Somewhere between these extremes, all great systems of 
national education hover. None realizes all the worst nor all 
the best agencies. Which are we nearest and toward which 
are we mainly tending? This is the vital, heart-searching 
question which is always in order, and perhaps never so much 
so as now. One thing is certain, however, that those within 
the system neither dare nor are they competent to judge it. 
Few of the outside criticisms, lately so numerous, have that 
degree of expertness which makes their voice authoritative. 
College presidents and professors, a few of whom might pro- 
nounce upon it, often have their own interests, the one in 
increasing the number of students for their institutions, and 
the other the advancing of their own text-books. They can 
never look at the system from without and with entire im- 
partiality. They usually know only parts of it, especially the 
high schools. Thus, these doctors, to whom our patients 
would most naturally turn, are not properly trained to diag- 
nose and prescribe, but are very prone to be suffering more 
or less from the same distempers while thinking themselves 
well, and thus do not rightly evaluate essential symptoms. 



INTRODUCTION xi 

Again, we are so rankly prosperous as a nation, so satisfied, 
have been so successful that we trust in the principle of laissez 
faire implicitly. Providence or nature will take care of 
America, and whatever betides, all will come out right in the 
end and bread will fall from somewhere into every open and 
hungry mouth, and so it usually does. The American gen- 
erally gets a living and gets on in this great land of oppor- 
tunity without needing to figure too closely. If the school 
is wasteful, so are homes, railroads, business methods, Con- 
gress, and the rest — and we can afford it. If the schools do 
not teach the right thing in the right way, the children gen- 
erally survive the loss and the tide of foreign immigrants gets 
assimilated somehow. Poorer nations may practice small 
educational economies, but we have no more pressing need 
of the conservation of humanity which drifts to us from all 
the earth than of forests and other natural resources. All 
this compels us to the conclusion that we cannot expect any 
radical reforms or reconstructions of our educational, without 
reform and reconstruction of our social, system, of which the 
school is essentially typical. 

Despite complaints of many sorts, just and unjust and 
from many sources, wise and otherwise, and despite the lau- 
dation of our system from top to bottom by its representatives 
and also by well-disposed and personally conducted foreign 
visitors, it has never yet had the benefit of much of any true 
criticism which was at the same time competent and impar- 
tial. This it profoundly needs, and never so much so as now, 
for never since its beginning has the public school been so 
inadequate to our needs, since, much as the latter has grown 
and improved, the demands which have to be made upon edu- 
cation have increased far more rapidly. The average Amer- 
ican citizen in embryo leaves school at the sixth grade, having 
had instruction only by poorly trained and underpaid women. 
He has had practically no training toward self-support, knows 
little or nothing of personal hygiene, which is the religion of 
the body, or of civics, which is the religion of citizenship, or 
of sex, which with the increasingly urban life is a source of 
more and greater dangers than ever before. Our young peo- 
ple are turned out into life just before the dawn of pubescence, 
most ignorant and most exposed. If the child has any re- 



xu INTRODUCTION 

ligion, it has come to him from outside the school. What is 
more vital than these things? School methods, texts and 
topics are traditional and teaching is slack and easy-going. 
The high school, and often the college, is mechanical, com- 
placent, and mediocrity of both is protected and kept in coun- 
tenance by their respectability. The true university is only 
half developed and the administrative and financial methods 
.of our old endowed institutions, if not " rotten," as the head 
of one of our largest and oldest universities has lately called 
them, are in crying need of radical revision, as I had intended 
to show, point by point, in chapters on the college, the uni- 
versity, the technical, medical, theological, and law schools, 
which are excluded from this volume by limitations of space, 
but which will appear later. Thus our whole system is in 
crying need of thoroughgoing inspection and overhauling by 
experts, such as commercial, manufacturing, and other con- 
cerns are now everywhere employing, to point out how wast- 
age can be avoided and greater efficiency secured. This work, 
boards that control both educational systems and institutions 
will, I am convinced, soon bring to pass. We need nothing 
less than a great educational revival all along the line, and I 
believe it has already begun and that a greater transformation 
than we have ever had, impends. Thus I am not pessimistic, 
for we have gained of late at a pace which, up to date, is 
constantly accelerating. 

I wish, therefore, that I dared to entitle this book The 
Pedagogy of the Future. Every one of the new departures 
indicated in the following chapters has, I believe, without 
exception, already been somewhere put in successful opera- 
tion, and the first duty of the present is to broaden our com- 
parative viewpoint until it has an international, if not world- 
wide, range and put into practice all the best that has been 
anywhere found to work well. But this is not all, for, before 
it is completely done, many new problems and possibilities 
now unglimpsed will be seen. Hence, the complete pedagogy 
of the future, when it comes, will be larger than it has yet 
entered into the heart of any man to conceive. Thus, the 
present situation should appeal to the best young men as edu- 
cation has never before appealed. All the four or five score 
of child-welfare agencies must and will be correlated with the 



INTRODUCTION xm 

school and directed from one central bureau, so that each 
child can be placed just where in the whole system it will 
get the most good. Each, too, will not only be inspected med- 
ically and morally, but studied for vocational aptitudes. If 
the reforms that are now possible, or even those that now 
seem imminent, are really effected, these volumes, instead of 
being the pedagogy of the future, will ere long become that 
of the past. That they may soon become so is my most 
earnest hope. 

For twenty-five years I have lectured Saturday mornings 
to teachers and to students upon Education, and this book is 
the final revision of parts of this course up to date, ending 
February, 191 1. The result is not unlike Uncle Tobey's coat, 
made over and over, part by part, with not only new fabrics, 
but new fashions, so that nothing to suggest the original re- 
mains. During these years I find that I have given over seven 
hundred outside addresses on educational subjects, to all kinds 
of audiences, and written several score of magazine articles and 
have drawn freely upon all this material, although the chapters 
as they here stand have been newly written and recast within 
the last ten months, with the printer at my heels, so that I 
have not been able to observe the obviously proper order of 
chapters. 

Besides my constant indebtedness to the Librarian of 
Clark University, Dr. Louis N. Wilson, who has helped me 
to find and procured from a distance many references, I am 
under special obligation to Dr. Theodate L. Smith, who has 
critically read all the manuscript as well as the proof of the 
second volume and suggested various improvements and addi- 
tions. I am also under unusual obligations to Miss Helen 
Cashman, who has typographed, read, and revised a large 
part of the manuscript and proof and prepared the authors' 
index; also to my pupils in Education for the use of their 
printed, and occasionally unprinted, theses, of which I have 
often made free use. 



TABLE OF CONTENTS 

VOLUME I 

PAGE 

Introduction v-xiii 

CHAPTER I 
The Pedagogy of the Kindergarten ...... i 

CHAPTER H 
The Educational Value of Dancing and Pantomime . . 42 

CHAPTER HI 
The Pedagogy of Music 91 

CHAPTER IV 

The Religious Training of Children and the Sunday- 
School ^ . 136 

CHAPTER V 
Moral Education 200 

CHAPTER VI 
Children's Lies: Their Psychology and Pedagogy , . 345 

CHAPTER VII 
The Pedagogy of Sex . 388 

CHAPTER VIII 
Industrial Education 540 

XV 



EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 



CHAPTER I 

THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 

The ideal kindergarten — Its value as a school for educating young women 
— Need of enlarging the scope of training schools— Froebel as a seer 
anticipating modern ideals — Froebel's defects — Lack of competent 
criticism— Need and lack of child study for the kindergarten age — 
Violations of Froebel's spirit in the modern kindergarten — Some 
specific reforms needed — Need of transcending Froebelian limitations 
— Burk's experiments with free play— Miss Blow's criticism of Miss 
Dopp, Dewey, and Hall— The kindergarten in Europe — Relations to 
the day nursery — The progressive and conservative schools. 

The more advanced the student and the more speciahzed 
the teaching the less pedagogy and genetic educational philos- 
ophy figure. In higher mathematics, astronomy, philology and 
the rest, the method is the logic of the science itself; and the 
arts of adaptation to ages and individuals play a small role. 
But, as we go down the scale of age or of intelligence, and as 
the interval between the knowledge and mental development of 
the teacher on the one hand and the taught on the other in- 
creases, the proportion of method to subject matter also 
increases. In teaching infants and still more in educating idi- 
ots and animals, as is now often done in the laboratory, we 
must not only elementarize the subject but know and gauge 
the capacities of those we teach. Thus the younger the pupils 
the more we must study them to adjust ; and the more general 
the culture to be imparted, the more we need to know and 
utilize the laws of the deepest philosophy of life. When this 
latter is entirely undeveloped, we must fall back on instinct 
and intuition, vague and ambiguous though their deliverances 
may be. To guide ourselves in the development of the very 
earliest stages of infancy, we can thus do little but stand aside 
out of Nature's way, and follow the promptings of parental 



2 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

love, or at best muse, brood, and consult the inner oracle of 
affection for the direction of our care-taking. These consider- 
tions, pertinent at every stage of education and history, where 
pedagogical theory and practice have advanced down the age 
scale toward the nursery, and even into it, are nowhere so 
necessary as in considering Froebel, whose nebulous specula- 
tions were bred by the Zeitgeist in the natal age of German 
philosophy, and also by the great idealistic movement which 
accompanied the birth of this puissant nation. His weird and 
bizarre version of this metaphysical ferment was a unique 
" culture bouillon " concocted of various ingredients : theo- 
sophic mysticism, foregleams of evolution, passionate enthusi- 
asm for nature just as the great scientific movement was 
dawning, and love of children based largely upon self-pity for 
the pathos of his own childhood, a motive that has prompted 
so many of the great founders of educational institutions to 
provide opportunities for subsequent generations to emanci- 
pate themselves from the ignorance that had handicapped their 
own lives. Perhaps these very defects have made Froebel's 
" Education of Man," which to adepts in the psychological 
disciplines has always seemed a nondescript medley and con- 
flation of unorganized apercus (a really unreadable book with 
seven seals, though it is), one of the best and most nourishing 
of all infant foods for novices in the speculative field, a book 
which will and should always be dear to women's souls, not so 
much for what it teaches their intellect, as because it makes 
them feel so profoundly the burden of the mystery of the nas- 
cent soul, the greatest miracle of life, and the sanctity of the 
offices of ministration to it, and shows that this insight and 
function are central and cardinal in the universe.^ 

I. — The very term " Kindergarten " is multifariously sug- 
gestive and its every possible meaning is charming. Froebel 
may well have cried " Eureka " when, after long quest for a 
fit name, he hit upon this, for it is an apt symbol of his type of 
mind as well as of the pedagogic endeavor of his life. It may 
signify a garden for, or a park of, children, themselves re- 
garded as the consummate flowers of nature; or even as a 



* See the interesting Chapter VIII on Froebel, in Dr. T. Misawa's Modem 
Educators and their Ideals, D. Appleton & Co., N. Y., 1909. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 3 

paradise fit to be the scene not of the creation of the first mature 
human pair, but the ideal setting or larger nest for children 
to be born and grow in. Flowers and trees are vastly older 
than mankind and have been worshiped at a certain stage 
by probably every race, of which they were perhaps the first 
educational environment, idealized always afterwards in folk- 
lore, myth, and song. Once every flower was a symbol or or- 
acle, and plants bore the signatures of planets and spoke a 
language of their own to the heart, while the trees, the abodes 
of men's ancient forebears, meant shelter or aspiration, ways 
leading up to the abodes of the gods. Groves, as man's first 
temples, where Druids felt most strongly the sensus numinis 
haunted by Dryads and herbs that sustained life before the 
dawn of agriculture, which marked the first settled modus 
Vivendi of the race and also the rise of human dominion over 
vegetal life, suggest precisely the Arcadia where alone child- 
hood is really at home or in its world. Again, a garden is both 
useful and ornamental and in it nature and nurture, from the 
time of the very first bower or home, have conspired to do 
their very best in the botanical, as education should in the 
animal, kingdom of man; so that it is prophetic of the time 
when man shall control the evolution of his own species as he 
has learned to domesticate and improve all the cultivated ce- 
reals and shrubs that blossom and bear seed and fruit. 

Thus the very word " children-garden " takes us to a region 
of the soul deep and rankly rich with felted and unanalyzable 
thoughts, feelings, and impulses, that are very strong but of 
a very primitive type. It suggests a new setting for childhood, 
its rescue from an artificial to its pristine state, at a time when 
fit environment is not only the best background for, but by 
far the most potent and central of, all the influences of educa- 
tion. Perhaps some time, when the reaction from the present 
urban and suburban conditions is complete and all schools are 
in the country (as increasing transportation facilities — trol- 
leys, autos and, perhaps before we know it, flying machines — 
may make practicable), and when the school-garden movement 
shall have done its perfect work, our near posterity, if not we, 
may realize this entrancing ideal of the reunion of the heart 
of childhood with the heart of nature. One need not be a 
bucolic poet, a landscape gardener, a horticulturist, or even a 



4 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

trained agriculturist to revel in imaginings of what a scenic 
farm school the great all-mother Nature has made possible for 
the early stages of human life. Would that pedagogues were 
occasionally inclined to see visions and dream dreams, instead 
of being as a class the most conservative, prosaic, and plodding, 
if not just now, under the dominion of modern modes of super- 
vision in this country, the most servile, of all half-skilled labor- 
ers. Walks, beds, hothouses, nurseries, lawns, playgrounds, 
shade, brooks, ponds, fertilizing, seed time and harvest, mois- 
ture and drought, grafting, budding, cross-fertilization by 
insects, the lessons of the soil, play in stone fields and snow 
and ice, tree setting, with arbor-day functions, cutting and 
lumbering, sugaring, all the impressive lessons of the proces- 
sional of the seasons with carefully chosen animal and bird 
life which means so much to children, learning and being 
taught on foot and out of doors and from objects, not from 
words or even pictures — such is Nature's pedagogium. Of 
nearly every item of her curriculum we rob the child during 
his most impressionable years when the soul is most plastic to 
her influences, shut children indoors, teach them in droves for 
years the attenuated and desiccated three R's, that they may 
learn to con books and newspapers and, above all, to figure. 
We pay a terrible price for this education. We often succeed in 
immunizing the child from experiences natural to his age. We 
rear him in ignorance of and isolate him from contact with the 
great influences that have made man man. Thus, with all our 
precautions, we make wizened souls in wizened bodies by kid- 
naping the child from his only true and real home which God 
has decreed and Nature has prepared for him. 

Only in its normal environment as above can we study the 
real child. Here he can live out all that is in him, without the 
repressions which in. the most emancipated child are so many, 
so dwarfing and often so indescribably pathetic, especially for 
girls. I am convinced that the civilized world has missed one 
of the most marvelous and inspiring of all spectacles : viz., the 
normal young child growing psychically all it is capable of 
growing, from within out, by leaps and bounds. This even the 
growth curve of the brain suggests as normal were the child 
only rightly circumstanced. Our bepedagogued world has 
little conception of what education can be and do. In his 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 5 

concept of nature as the child's nurse, mother, and teacher, 
even Rousseau was a palhd and shut-in convalescent, just be- 
ginning wistfully to dream and think out of doors. Oh, for 
one really ideal kindergarten in the world to demonstrate all 
this to carping and incredulous pedagogues with their distorted 
and mean ideas of children, and their dense ignorance of their 
deeper nature and their possibilities ! It would cost much 
money; but how can the wealth and service in the world be 
better spent than in restoring children to Nature and opening 
wide rather than shutting the doors of opportunity and in- 
centive for observation, language, self-activity, all-sided in- 
terest, true race recapitulation, hygiene, the preformation of the 
soul for virtue, religion, social and industrial efficiency — all of 
which languish in the four walls of the schoolroom where 
children are caged like wild animals in captivity, until the 
gamey flavor of the open and the call of the wild within them, 
and their most inalienable rights to Nature are lost. 

Little of all this was ever formulated in Froebel's mind; 
but reverberations in this direction were always felt in his 
heart, animating and inspiring him. Far as he fell below such 
an idea at every point, nevertheless it quickened his work from 
start to finish. He wrought only with country children, and 
never dreamed of the wholesale transportation of his system 
to the city, from the poor to the rich; the limitation of it to 
two or three hours for at most five days a week ; the academi- 
cization of his theories in university chairs, or the over- 
specialization to which child care has been subjected so that to- 
day the kindergarten is only one of some forty other types of 
child-welfare institutions as we classify them here ; nor did he 
dream of the development of an intolerant Froebelian ortho- 
doxy, suspicious of the new departures and innovations that 
are so indispensable for progress, or the development of con- 
servative and radical parties, or the isolation of his methods 
in infant grades so that he has influenced no other stages or 
kinds of education and there is an often abrupt break between 
them and the earliest school classes. 

II. — Turning now from children to teachers, we confront 
another great ideal that Froebel far more faintly glimpsed. 
In our Western civilization, a large and growing proportion 
of young women who have reached an age where Nature in- 



6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tended them to be mothers, are by circumstance or by their 
own choice unwed and childless. Ehrenfels, in several recent 
publications, has attracted great attention in Germany by urg- 
ing that China and Japan will eventually surpass and overcome 
the Western nations because, in the former, practically every 
woman of fertile age is actually bearing children, while in the 
latter a large proportion of women, during their whole, and 
especially during the best earlier years of their maturity, are 
exempted from motherhood, as well as because in the West 
more wives are barren than in the East, and more who perform 
the maternal function do so imperfectly. If now we survey the 
occupations of the vast army of American young women, who 
are not contributing to the population, but who are in shops, as 
well as office girls, teachers, and the long list of those in wage- 
earning vocations open to young women — we find that few, if 
any of these occupations, unless that of nurse, are better cal- 
culated to keep alive and develop more of the potentialities of 
motherhood or to vicariate for its functions than the kinder- 
garten can and should do. Few occupations in which women 
engage unfit less for family life or involve less change of spirit 
and ideals if marriage comes. The very contact with young 
children, if not mechanized as in the grades, tends to keep 
women cheery, fresh, young, original, and healthful in soul 
and body. If society makes ladies, the college, scholars, the 
industries, managers or higher servants, the kindergarten 
makes women and gives those who would and should become 
mothers one of the very best substitutes for this function and 
preserves the best there is in young or even in aging maiden- 
hood. 

This by no means implies that existing kindergarten train- 
ing schools provide this optimal preparation or succedaneum, as 
some of them advertise to do, for their courses are often formal, 
intellectual, and of late frequently too academic. Oversophis- 
tication here may actually enfeeble or pervert the maternal 
instinct ; and there is a type of scholastic old-maidishness that 
is positively dangerous for young maidenhood in the glory of 
its first maturity, the touch of which tends to wither and breed 
distrust of the best things in the soul, because it generates re- 
pression, prim proprieties, and self-consciousness rather than 
all-sided expansion and expression. Thus with its large and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 7 

growing army of acolytes, the kindergarten should now seek 
as a function, second only to doing the most and best for young 
children, to do the most and best for young women in training 
and in the ranks. Thus a new and not yet adequately recog- 
nized duty is now laid upon us — to provide maiden pro- 
bationaries for motherhood, with such ideal environment 
and occupations as will make them true mothers in heart 
and soul because lovers and servers of children. Between 
the soul of the child from three to six and the soul of the young 
woman in the middle and later twenties and the early thirties, 
there is a strong, native rapport, deeper than anything educa- 
tion can supply. Each responds to the other in a way that even 
genetic psychology is only just learning to appreciate. This 
interval of age remains a constant one of maximal efficiency 
as woman and child advance in years. Just as babies keep even 
an aging mother young in soul, so kindergartners are kept 
juvenile in mind and no doubt also in body by daily, homey 
converse with children. This age correlation and the rejuvena- 
tion caused by life with childhood are now looming up as great 
themes, which but for our limits in space should have fuller 
treatment here. 

Many now tell us that just the physical handling of chil- 
dren at this age when they still need considerable manipulation 
is far more essential than we are wont to think for their best 
development. But here, too, there is a correlative advantage, 
and the kindergartner should, for her own good, care much for 
the bodily needs of her charges. She should not merely direct 
gifts and occupations, tell stories and lead games and songs, 
but at least occasionally wash, comb, dress, feed, and otherwise 
stand as completely as possible in the mother's place, use her 
hands upon the child in every helpful way and have a prag- 
matic interest in shoes, stockings, cap, hat, food, drink, buttons, 
etc. ; be and do sometimes all that a nurse can be and do ; recog- 
nize that the child's bodily needs are as great as perhaps and 
paramount in importance to, the needs of its soul, so that often 
those that do most for the physical do most for the psychic and 
the moral. Without this her very love for the child is incom- 
plete, as are her ministrations ; and there is loss both to her and 
to the child. With the nursery age and needs, there must be 
nursery functions. How can a woman possibly love and serve a 



8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

young child whose body she does not know and minister to In 
every intimate and necessary way? If she regards this as 
degrading, and aspires to be a mentor to the soul only, she is 
dematernalizing her own soul to some extent and orphanizing 
the child and impairing its psycho-physic unity. Thus nothing 
affecting the welfare of the child at this age should be foreign 
to her interests or helpfulness. 

Now combine this concept of the teacher with that of the 
outdoor functions suggested above, and we shall realize that 
the ideal kindergartner should introduce the child to Nature and 
social life. She must know something of the lore of beasts, 
birds, flowers, and trees. Her Nature should be breezy with 
out of doors, and bring the spirit of Nature in and take the 
child to It. The Ideal test of her work would be what she 
could do with a band of children in such an environment as I 
described above or In a day spent in rambles over and gambols 
through gardens and groves, by water, amidst the fall of 
leaves, or among the most edifying flora and fauna. The 
Ideal kindergartner should know and feel and love Nature and 
stand in heart-to-heart relations with her, and be able to ex- 
pose the child to all of the influences to which it is susceptible. 
This should be first and foremost and the more special indoor 
work should be developed on this basis. She should seek 
health in all its new loftier meanings and strive to reproduce 
and keep alive in herself the first fresh thoughts and experi- 
ences of the race, and Impart them to the children in their most 
receptive periods. 

Thus, I would greatly enlarge the scope of nature study in 
kindergarten training schools. Our forebears for countless 
ages knew no other teacher than Nature, and to all the notes 
and harmonies In her magnificent symphony, the soul is attuned 
in childhood, and if the chords are not smitten betimes, there Is 
grave loss. I would not entirely exclude the gifts and occupa- 
tions, but they should be once for all completely subordinated 
and relegated to a very small place in the kindergarten as com- 
pared to nature work. The latter should be of a unique and 
not yet quite adequately appreciated kind. Popular science and 
the work of the naturalist afield may nourish the kindergart- 
ner's soul but, what Is more central in her needs, I have 
attempted elsewhere to describe (cf. my Adolescence, chapter 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 9 

XII, Adolescent Feelings Toward Nature and a New Educa- 
tion in Science). The great themes and categories here are: 
sky, stars, sun, moon, clouds, thunder, water in its various 
forms — sea and shore, lake and river — wind, fire, insects and 
their most marvelous instincts, such as cross-fertilization, their 
modes of producing and rearing their young, etc., plants and 
animal types and, highest of all, primitive men and children, 
popularizing results of anthropology. These should be felt 
and told of, sometimes in a more or less mystic way, so as to 
stir the ancestral reverberations which bring a regenerative 
vital touch between the child soul and that of the race, which 
once and somewhere worshiped all these objects, making them 
of supreme value and of most vital interest. On such themes 
and their ramifications in myth and story, the kindergartner 
should nourish her soul and recognize that, to nothing that 
vitally stirs her, will the child's soul be unresponsive. Some- 
thing like this is the religious background out of which all 
human culture grew, for religion, science, art, and literature 
came forth out of the heart of Nature. This is the all-condi- 
tioning, all-impelling interest that motivates every form of edu- 
cation that is truly vital. This, too, normalizes as well as 
elevates, broadens, and enriches the emotional life of young 
womanhood as nothing else can, and keeps sentiment safe- 
guarded against relapse to sentimentality. Just as only the 
woman's soul knows what flowers really mean, so she is better 
fitted than man to give the most sound, human response to 
Nature's primitive teachings, which fit her heart as nothing 
that our academic curriculum offers can do. 

In fine, I would have all kindergartners trained chiefly in 
this type of nature study, focusing in the study of childhood. 
We need not entirely exclude the quaint philosophy of Froebel, 
nor his pedagogical technic; for these, especially the former, 
are not entirely without value for that ideal education of young 
womanhood toward which the world is now groping. But, if 
anything is now plain in this obscure field, it is that Nature 
must be chiefly stressed as the source of all other intellectual 
and moral interests. Child-study, as it has now taken form, 
promises to be the best logical, genetic, and pedagogic focus 
of all the sciences that deal with life. When we reduce human 
institutions — ^home, school, state, church — to their ultimate 



lo EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

raison d'etre, we find that their vakie is always measured by 
their service in bringing the successive generations to birth and 
to the highest and best maturity possible. The child is the 
focus of interest for every kind of social and humanistic study. 
Thus we reach the dual goal of culture — Nature and the child, 
or the child fitly set in its paradise. These are the cores of the 
best education which has or ever can be devised for young 
women and this, as I believe, conservative kindergarten wise- 
acres to the contrary notwithstanding, is, if we interpret his 
letter by his spirit, precisely " according to Froebel," who in 
the practical realization of his ideals fell far below them, as, in- 
deed, most of us do. 

III. — Coming now to Froebel himself, I desire to state at the 
outset that I have read almost every printed word of his, have 
visited many scores of kindergartens at home and abroad, gave 
lately a university year of Saturday lectures upon this system, 
issued a questionnaire concerning points doubtful to my mind 
which was copiously answered by many of its best representa- 
tives, have always had one or more kindergarten conferences 
at the Clark University Summer School, with one at our Child 
Welfare Convention in July, 1909, and have gathered and pe- 
rused quite a literature upon this subject. This it is necessary 
to premise, because the stock answer of kindergartners, like 
that of the theosophists, epistemologists, faith curists, Em- 
manuelists, etc., is that the critics do not understand the system ; 
and if, in what follows, my limitations are painfully apparent, 
I wish to be credited with at least an honest desire and a real 
effort to overcome them. Although I see people, whom my 
egotism leads me to think not very much more gifted or better 
informed than I, walking with such sure steps where I tremble, 
doubt, and fear, and saying, as apologists for existing condi- 
tions, such transcendentally wise and beautiful things that I 
often cannot understand, I, nevertheless, cannot forbear feeling 
some slight trepidation lest I am about to expose some grave 
mental weakness or constitutional deficiency. 

Again, let me premise that I believe heart and soul in the 
kindergarten as I understand it, and insist that I am a true 
disciple of Froebel, that my orthodoxy is the real doxy which, 
if Froebel could now come to New York, Chicago, Worcester, 
or even to Boston, he would approve. His was one of the deep- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN n 

est, truest, and most intuitive of minds. His heart was one of 
the most devoted to be found in the whole history of education. 
It might also be a watchword of most educational reforms now 
needed to carry the Froebelian spirit, as its author intended 
to do, up through all the grades of school work, including 
even the university. We need to organize a systematic work of 
rescuing Froebel from the now, or at least till very lately, dom- 
inant conservative wing of his American disciples. 

Again, so far as my acquaintance and personal impressions 
go, kindergartners are perhaps, on the whole, if not the most 
womanly and motherly representatives of their sex to be found 
in modern society, as I have said they ought to be, at least 
second to no other class of women in this respect. Some of 
them come from the best and some from other classes of society, 
but all are drawn to the work by the truest and highest instincts. 
There is more love of children, more sympathy with, and more 
practical knowledge of them in the kindergarten as it exists 
to-day, than in any other grade of education; and its repre- 
sentatives are eminently lovable and marriageable. No better 
training for wifehood and domestic life has ever been devised 
where the ideal is approached. As a rule, those young women 
who seem by nature distinctly set apart for celibate life, and for 
the high services of philanthropy now open to women in private 
and public spheres, are not found here. Parental instincts are 
the best motive power at this stage, as they should be at all 
stages, of education. I believe, too, that American kindergart- 
ners really want the truth, that they are naturally rather more 
open-minded than most women teachers of higher grades, and 
that the presupposition of common sense as a basis of appeal 
is on the whole a pretty safe one with them. 

What, now, are some of the great ideas which the educa- 
tional world owes in whole or in part to Froebel ?. I think they 
may be listed as follows : 

I. — He was the first, before even embryology had pointed 
out the fact, to teach that the child repeats the history of the 
race, recapitulating its stages. This is now one of the key- 
notes of genetic psychology, which ought to make it a welcome 
friend, and not a suspected visitor, in the kindergarten meetings 
and journals. 

2. — Feeling and instinct are the germs of intellect and the 



12 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

will. Schleiermacher, and later Horwicz, and recently most of 
the best psychologists and alienists lay great stress upon this 
primacy of the heart ; and just now geneticists everywhere are 
reaffirming the doctrine that the higher mental powers are 
evolved out of the larger life of feeling and emotion or affec- 
tivity. 

3. — Froebel taught self-activity and spontaneity, and that 
play was one of the great revealers of the direction of inherent 
interest and capacity. He first saw that if the play instincts are 
turned on as the great motive power in school, far more can 
be accomplished, and that more easily and with less strain. 
Man must create; children are by nature abounding in the 
power of almost divine origination. 

4. — He was a passionate monist, a representative of the 
higher pantheism, God-intoxicated almost like Cleanthes and 
Spinoza. He was in the true apostolic succession of those 
great souls whose lives were expanded and directed by a sense 
that in God we live, move, and have our being. He was the 
first to apply to education these pantheistic conceptions, which 
are the culmination of all natural religion, which, how- 
ever, it need hardly be said are neither necessary for, nor 
common in, kindergarten work. Whatever we may think of 
his creed, this inevitably brought with it new standpoints and 
new methods. 

5. — He believed in the original soundness and wholeness 
of human nature, rather than in Calvinistic ideas of its de- 
pravity, and hence abhorred all interfering, or radically recon- 
structing, methods of education, but thought the latter should 
be always developmental. 

6. — Almost as a corollary of the first statement he exhorted 
that every child should be at each stage of his life all that that 
stage called for. He must, as we should put it, use the rudi- 
mentary organs of his mind — be a complete animal, if there 
is a complete animal stage of childhood — as the conditio sine 
qua non of the highest maturity on the human plane later. The 
future should not dominate; and adult views and standards 
should not be prematurely enforced. Youth should not scorn 
boyhood, nor boyhood infancy. The atmosphere should be 
pervaded with harmony, love, and freedom. 

7. — We must all live for and with the children. Indeed, 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 13 

what else is there in all this world worth living, working, dying 
for? We adults pass on after we have transmitted the sacred 
torch of life; and the only test of state, home, church, school, 
or civilization is whether or not it brings childhood and youth 
to the fullest possible maturity, 

8. — He believed in trusting intuition, and not in the elabo- 
rate methodology which whips up the beer of knowledge into 
a froth, puts form above substance and content, which always 
analyzes processes, and lets no operation pass without demand- 
ing an explanation. The child, he said, is a seed in the ground, 
which does not see the sun or feel the rain directly, but is not 
unresponsive to every change of temperature, moisture, or 
light. " The unconsciousness of a child is rest in God." This 
saying alone shows that Froebel's standpoint was not inferior 
to that of Wordsworth in his famous Ode, and that he dimly 
foresaw the work that has been done lately on that part of the 
soul which lies below the threshold of consciousness, but from 
its unfathomable depths rules all our life. 

9. — Lastly, I shall mention Froebel's belief in health.^ The 
child is a plant, a vegetable, and must, as I said above, live out 
of doors, or in as nearly out-of-door conditions as possible. He 
realized that health was the basis and test of all, and was one 
of the morning stars of the new hygiene. 

It has been often asked where Froebel got his philosophical 
conceptions. We know of his relations to Schelling, Fichte, 
and especially Krause; and this explains much, but not all or 
even the best. He was essentially a seer, a mystic, a deep- 
minded, large-eyed soul-gazer wrestling with great concep- 
tions, half revealed and half concealed by his mode of expres- 
sion. It is painful to read the Jacob-like wrestlings of his soul 
with the angel for names, words, and phrases, and how often, 
after mentally gasping and gagging, and iterating, perhaps 
tediously — until we almost wish he had taken refuge like other 
mystics in snatches of some unknown tongue, or, like Jahn, 
had had recourse to words originally invented — he ex- 

^ I cannot refrain from referring to the comprehensive report on National 
Vitahty, Bulletin of the Committee of One Hundred on National Health, by Irving 
Fisher, Government Print. Office, July, 1909; and W. H. Allen's Civics and 
Health, Ginn & Co., Boston, 1909, to suggest the present dimensions of this 
subject. 



14 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

claims that it is all too deep, and feels that the simplest thing 
or act cannot be told. 

In the German word saugen (to suck) he sees s'augen (to 
eye oneself or come to self-knowledge) ; in Sinne (or sense) 
he sees sinne, with an intimation of reflecting upon oneself. 
From this aphasic limitation in his power of expression come 
the many involutions, the tiresome tautologies, the singular 
absence of humor that might be copiously illustrated, the sense 
that everything is iridescent with all kinds of symbolic mean- 
ings, the obscurities and ambiguities which have baffled or 
divided his followers, the rhapsodizing " motive," and his dis- 
position, like the pseudo-Dionysius, Boehme, Eckhardt, and 
other deep, but inarticulate souls, to see everything in any- 
thing. He needs editing, with much expurgation of repetitions 
and judicious explanation of obscurities. 

Moreover, he did not entirely escape the limitations of his 
race, which at that time was eminently unpractical. His early 
architectural education, his study and curatorship of crystals, 
his meager mathematical studies, and his manual labor, all 
tended more or less to give definiteness to his method of 
mental action; but his training was essentially in inanimate 
nature. Biology was then quite undeveloped. He was largely 
color blind; and he did not live to apply his methods to the 
higher stages of education which know him not. Had his 
training been in some of the fields of study which deal with 
practical life, and had he had the advantages of the many lines 
of work which nowadays would seem to give a better founda- 
tion to all his thought, it is difficult to conjecture what the 
results would have been; but without doubt they would have 
been very different and better. 

Nearly all his disciples have been women, most of them 
not mothers, but of an age when a certain natural void which 
only family life can fill, makes itself felt. I believe there is 
nowhere a philosophy — nothing even that can be made out of 
Delsa^tism, mysticism, Browning, or Nietzsche — so funda- 
mentally wholesome and educating for young women at a cer- 
tain stage as Froebelism. At this age they must idealize, and 
vicariously, or, by the law of kinetic equivalents, must make, 
if they do not find, objects for love, enthusiasm, and devotion. 
Just as childless monks evoked all the beauty and glory of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 15 

Mariolatry, so I am inclined to think we see the faint begin- 
nings of a Froebelolatry slowly evolving in the heart of this 
noblest type of American maidenhood. And just as the mental 
activities favored by monastic life developed scholasticism, so 
we have in the exiguous symbolism of the fully panoplied 
Froebelian exegete what Balzac would call a human document 
no less precious for studying the mental tendencies of celibate 
life among cultured women. Thus, while Froebel enlarged and 
glorified womanhood, women have paid the debt by enlarging 
and glorifying him. 

It is singular that Froebel has hardly had a thoroughly 
scholarly and critical estimate, although I do not forget the 
many eminent critics who have lately summarized and passed 
judgment upon him. He has had eulogists and explanations 
galore; his philosophy has been spun out in many directions 
by ardent apologists, disciples, and worshipers; but the over- 
whelming majority not only of kindergartners, but of their 
leaders, lack university, or even college, training; and the two 
or three ablest and best trained of his apostles who have at- 
tained this plane of culture are holophrastic idealists of his own 
camp, not trained in modern psychology, and suspicious of it, 
and disciples of the overcome standpoint of Hegel and his ilk. 

Hence it comes that in this country the kindergartners have 
been till lately an educational sect by themselves. They have 
talked of kindergarten principles rather than of educational 
principles ; their courses of study have dealt very little with the 
general history of education; and even the two or three most 
learned of them have not extended their interests much be- 
yond Schelling, Fichte, and Kant. Of evolution, a type of 
thought in which Froebel would have reveled with all his soul, 
they have known little and cared less. The extremely able lady 
who has so long dominated, with her thought and powerful per- 
sonality, the entire intellectual field of the American kindergar- 
ten, almost like a pope, long intimidated every dissenter, and 
her nearer disciples sought to suppress, by condemnation and 
even social ostracism, all those that sought to breathe a freer 
and larger air; while so overperfect is the organization of 
kindergartners that this repression was long generally all too 
effective. Herbart has lately been felt in this country as a very 
valuable intellectual stimulus, which has greatly broadened and 



i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

deepened the best American educational thought ; but in a pro- 
nouncement a few years since kindergartners were warned by 
this leader to beware of him and all his ways and works, be- 
cause, forsooth, his theories of the nature of the ego were not 
satisfactory to her. 

Perhaps the finest kindergarten installation In the world 
to-day is the magnificent newly built and endowed Pestalozzi- 
Froebel House, in the outskirts of Berlin, with its ample 
grounds, individual flower beds, fish ponds, wild wood for 
birds, and its well-equipped building for a cooking school. 
For kindergartners going abroad to study, it is altogether the 
best place. A few years ago I studied it with rare pleasure 
and edification. But we have been so effectively warned 
against it because the name of Pestalozzi has been added to 
that of Froebel, that I found only one American woman there — 
while in inferior establishments in Germany there were many. 
At this place the gifts and occupations have been reduced to a 
minimum, and are gradually being abandoned for better things. 
Nursing and cooking are included in the training course, and 
so is the general history of education. At noon the younger 
children are put to sleep on floor mattresses in the gymnasium ; 
also many other admirable new departures — most neces- 
sary, but which, for the most part, are disallowed by the 
American orthodoxy — have been made. 

Again, Froebel was the morning star of the child-study 
movement, and would have rejoiced to see its day. The school 
referred to is in the legitimate line of Froebelian descent, at 
least quite as much as the conservative American school, which 
looks upon it with so much suspicion. Its ideal is to construct 
a psychology that shall be really genetic, to introduce evolution 
into the sphere of mind, and to make everything plastic to the 
nature and needs of the child. It has till lately received, how- 
ever, but the faintest recognition from the body of kindergarten 
teachers, was for a long time generally suspected, and its 
methods and results were almost unknown in American train- 
ing schools, although, as we shall see, the newer leaders are 
changing for the better in this respect. 

The most decadent intellectual new departure of the con- 
servative American Froebelists, however, is the emphasis now 
laid upon the mother plays as the acme of kindergarten wis- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 17 

dom. These are represented by very crude poems, indifferent 
music, and pictures — the hke of which were never seen in any 
art exhibit — iUustrating certain incidents of child hfe beheved 
to be of fundamental and typical significance. I have read these 
in German and in English, have strummed the music, and have 
given a brief course of lectures from the sympathetic stand- 
point, trying to put all the new wine of meaning I could think 
of into them. But I am driven to the conclusion that, if they 
are not positively unwholesome and harmful for the child, and 
productive of anti-scientific and unphilosophical intellectual 
habits in the teacher, they should nevertheless be superseded by 
the far better things now available, I grant freely that they 
now have a certain advantage of position, because so much 
meaning has accumulated about them; but the positions were 
badly chosen, the mental unities are artifacts, and everything 
has to be radically reconstructed and redistributed as the mind 
unfolds. The mother plays are related to the more standard 
parts of Froebel's doctrine somewhat as Comte's later specula- 
tions about society — which John Stuart Mill thought were 
really insane — are related to the sounder, positive dreameries 
of his earlier years ; so that the kindergartners who follow this 
direction are as far from the legitimate succession as are the 
Comteists of the Stephen Pearl Andrews type from Lass and 
Comte's true French line. The mother play Epigoni illustrate 
in petto the same tendency we see in the Peripatetics after 
Aristotle, or the later academicians in the decadence of Platon- 
ism before it issued in the vagaries of Proclus and Plotinus. 
It would be easy to devote this article to the apotheosis of sym- 
bolism here presented, which deserves a place in Nordau's lec- 
tures, on degeneration, and to show how the symbolic mode of 
thought has been transcended, and how the habit of seeing 
" everything as a sign to be interpreted " is a vicious one. 
Another cardinal error of the conservative kindergarten is 
the intensity of its devotion to the gifts and occupations. In 
devising these, Froebel showed much sagacity; but the scheme 
as it left his own hands was a very inadequate embodiment of 
his educational ideas, even for his own time. He thought it 
a perfect grammar of play and an alphabet of industries ; and 
in this opinion he was utterly mistaken. Play and industry 
were then relatively undeveloped; and while his devices were 



1 8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

no doubt beneficent for the peasant children in the country, 
whom he taught, they lead, in the interests of the modern city 
child, a very pallid, unreal life. For the symbolic method that 
finds everything in everything, any random selections could 
readily be made the center of an imposing set of explanations. 

The great faults of the gifts and occupations, however, are 
not only that there are hundreds of other things that would do 
as well ; but I am convinced that two or three score could easily 
be found that possess great natural advantages over most, if not 
all, of these. Moreover, they deal with inanimate objects and 
too mathematical conceptions, while this is the age when the 
child's interest in animals culminates, and when his character 
is pregnant with moral suggestions as well as with scientific 
interests. They are also overemphasized; and idolatry of the 
ball, cube, slats, pricking, peawork, and the rest makes the 
kindergartner not only indifferent to new departures in the 
rapid development of recent times, but so suspicious of novel- 
ties that new gifts or occupations have to overcome a great 
presumption against them. The inner connection theory and 
the scheme of analyzing to a point and then developing from it 
are fantastic and superficial; and it is persistently forgotten 
that the meanings seen or claimed exist solely for the teacher 
and not at all for the child. 

Much of the work involves a great waste of teaching, with 
great effort to inculcate early what will later come naturally and 
better of itself. The drawing of the kindergarten children thus 
tends to be wooden ; and its introduction into the curriculum is 
to invert the order of nature, which prompts the child to draw 
complex scenes with animals and men in motion first, with 
never a straight line, circle, or mathematical angle until much 
later. The sins of this introduction of regular mathematical 
forms against both the artistic sense and power of execution, 
which can be laid to the door of the kindergarten, are many and 
great. Moreover, as administered, the occupations tend to 
overwork the children, to interest them and the parents in the 
products of the little school factory, and to lay too great stress 
on sedentary activities and the finer and late developed acces- 
sory muscles. 

Strange to say, one of the most heinous offenses of the 
modern kindergarten is against the plain precept of health, in 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 19 

this age of marvelous renaissance in school hygiene. If a com- 
petent trained inspector were to go through the kindergartens 
of our large cities and report upon what provisions were made 
against contagious diseases ; upon how many children used the 
same drinking cup, soap, towel ; upon the condition and mode 
of use of toilet rooms; on the percentage of window to floor 
space ; on the provisions for regulating temperature ; upon ven- 
tilation and drafts ; on the hygiene of the nose, ears, teeth, and, 
above all, of the nerves; upon the matter and manner of 
lunches; as to what influence the kindergarten sought to exert 
upon the home diet of children ; upon signs of fatigue and the 
automatisms seen and often developed; on the effects of the 
preparations for Christmas and New Year's, upon sleep and 
health generally; upon the amount of room space per child, 
etc., the results would be shown to be still sadder in the kinder- 
garten than in any other grade of educational work to-day. 
The lack of official inspection, the convenience and ease of the 
teacher, the limited means with which many kindergartens are 
conducted, and, we must add, the relatively too absorbing de- 
votion to speculative theory are responsible for this neglect. 
The present is, however, witnessing a happy if slow improve- 
ment in this respect. 

In direct contradiction to all this, Froebel believed the child 
should live out of doors; would give each child a flower bed 
that he might have access to Mother Earth; emphasized the 
need of abundant and healthful activity for the whole body, 
and understood the hygienic necessities of leisure. We 
forget that the very definition of school means leisure ; that the 
child must have it in great abundance ; and that he must be pro- 
tected and shielded from the activities of the great world ; so 
that Nature and heredity — an ounce of which is worth tons of 
education — can get in their work. Quiet, rest, sleep, lethargy, 
and, above all, daydreaming, are essential; and he must have 
a strong cause who would interfere with Nature's operations. 

The nursery element, now often so abhorred, must be greatly 
emphasized in our kindergartens. Some factors of the now 
admirable education of nurses should be introduced by a com- 
petent medical instructor in all the training schools. Next to 
out of doors, the kindergarten, at least in winter, might be 
on the top floor under a roof wide open to light, where some 



20 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

of the health provisions of hospitals are seen. Lectures to 
kindergartners on foods and nutrition, on emergencies, and 
on other practical matters, instead of on the scholastic meta- 
physics now in vogue, are most urgently and imperatively de- 
manded for the welfare of the rising generation. I would like 
to see organized a work of rescue to deliver the modern kin- 
dergarten from the metaphysicians, and to give it over to the 
philosophical hygienists, who should make it everywhere and 
first of all a place of health. « 

IV. — The needed reforms in the kindergarten must, of 
course, come with deliberation enough to be sure. A commit- 
tee of ten or more might help, provided they were not kinder- 
gartners, but were wise and competent; although a badly ap- 
pointed committee would do harm by confirming old practices. 
Let me confess frankly that I do not, myself, know at present 
just what should be done or just how this grade of education 
should be best organized. One of my dearest wishes is to have 
adequate means placed at my disposal to experiment a few 
years, or until I could present a scheme of detailed work. 
That this could now be done from data that are accessible is 
certain. Great improvements are entirely practicable. 

A few things I shall venture to indicate. The body must 
be strengthened. The activities should involve more body 
movements, and the strain upon the hand and eye should be 
reduced. The very high educational value of dancing should 
be exploited even more than it is. It cadences the entire soul 
as almost nothing else. Building should be done with much 
larger blocks. Catching, throwing, and lifting plays and 
games should be selected from Mr. Johnson's ^ or some other 
convenient, repertory. Imitation, or " do-as-I-do " activities 
should have a larger place. Beanbags, and, if there were 
room, perhaps the hoop, the jumping-rope, and the kite may 
have some place. 

Certainly the doll, with all its immense educational power, 
should be carefully introduced. Much might be said in favor 
of the color top, peg board, soap bubbles, and such old plays as 
jackstraws and knuckle bones. All the proceedings of the 
Toy Congress, and the contents of the toy shop, should always 

^ Johnson, G. E.: Education by Plays and Games. Ginn & Co., 1907, 234 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 21 

be studied and used. Sorting out very heterogeneous blocks 
and cards, and laying like to like, might be tried ; while pop- 
corn, play with chalk, shells, spools, pictures — perhaps cut and 
pasted milkweed pods, potato work, possibly the whip, and 
all possible contact with animate life should be carefully de- 
veloped — -always remembering that the child's interest in ani- 
mals culminates before that in flowers or trees, and that the 
latter reaches its apex before interest in inanimate things. 
When W'C reflect for a moment on the richness of the possible 
symbolism that might be developed out of objects like the 
above, we realize that the intellectual pabulum, even according 
to the current Froebel philosophy, would be condensed and en- 
riched rather than otherwise. Each of these things and hun- 
dreds of others could train the mind just as well. The curric- 
ulum could be just as progressive, and the motor elements of 
education just as emphatic. 

The kindergarten should do much more for language, on 
the basis of what we now know of child linguistics, not only 
for the voice in training to speak freely and well, but for the 
vocabulary. The vernacular never sinks so deep or becomes 
so vigorous and idiomatic as wdien most closely linked to activ- 
ity ; but many kindergartens turn out children very imperfectly 
developed in this respect. One important function in selecting 
each item of the curriculum should be its language value; for 
this is the nascent period when, if ever, the foundations are laid 
for pure idiomatic English. It is important that the teacher's 
voice be attractive, well modulated, her words well chosen, 
her English correct, her linguistic resources ample and fertile ; 
but still more important is it that the child should here be 
taught expression. The overvoluble may occasionally need 
repression ; but most children do not talk enough in the kinder- 
garten. Again, wherever practicable, living, foreign languages 
should be taught in the upper grades of kindergartens by a 
native teacher, to those children who are likely to study them 
later in connection with every activity. At five and six the ear 
and tongue begin their nascent period for other languages, and 
not to improve it is to make the work harder later on. 

Everything that is done or seen should, in short, be reflected 
in language. It should not, however, be the stupid concert 
work common in the kindergarten, but free personal conversa- 



22 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tion with each child. To see a picture or handle an object 
while talking about it greatly aids the power of expression, not 
only in our own, but in a foreign language ; so that it should 
be a rule to confine such conversation as closely as possible, 
word for word, at least to the picture, if not to the object and 
to the act. 

Standard stories with myths should be told more ; and per- 
haps this ought to be the central thing, or, at least, next to 
activity. Not only Grimm and .^sop, but some of the Old 
Testament tales, tales from Homer, etc., can be told, in a most 
effective way, by a sympathetic teacher, at the kindergarten 
age. Story-telling ought to be a profession ; and if I could 
examine kindergarten teachers I should regard the test in this 
respect as second to none in importance. The same story can 
be repeated. This is the primeval way of education ; thus all 
culture was transmitted before books. Animal tales, perhaps 
acted out, stories of savage life, of fancy, something of the 
fairies, with games like hide and seek — and a vast amount of 
such work in great variety — should be included. 

Music should be looked upon as indispensable and made 
even more prominent. Most of the new music I believe to be 
cheap and unworthy of the child. The old ballads and songs 
of nature, God, home, and country educate the sentiments in 
ways we have never known. There is much to be said in favor 
of the violin instead of the piano. The teacher should sing, 
and a great deal of music should be heard. Froebel's standard 
can here be greatly transcended. Occasional whistling would, 
of course, be admirable. Songs with action are important here 
— bad as they are later — for the development of the voice. 
There is something in the cake walk — which seems to me the 
very apotheosis of human love antics — that could be utilized 
for older children, who might be encouraged to act a part and 
begin to indulge that great instinct of assuming an alien per- 
sonality with the aid of costumes, disguises, and masques. 
Children appreciate poetry with alliteration and even slang in 
it, which has its partial justification ; and the sequence and con- 
tinuity, identity and contrast, which are so much insisted on 
are utterly alien as principles to the child mind at this animistic 
age. 

Among other things it would be quite germane to an ideal 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 23 

kindergarten to have a stone and a woodyard, where many- 
stones of as diverse kinds, shapes, color, quahties, etc., as pos- 
sible should be accumulated, including a load of smooth, varie- 
gated pebbles from the beach ; and from these up to sizes that 
the children would have to exert themselves to lift or even roll. 
There should be a level space for them to pile them into tiny 
cairns, barrows, cromlechs, make alignment, playhouses, etc. 
There should be also a generous collection of small boards, 
large wooden blocks, slats, etc., etc., not entirely without 
slivers. Here children might indulge their primitive instincts 
to construct, with material heavy enough to exercise the larger 
muscles. They could assort them by size, color, shape, smooth- 
ness of feel, etc. It would be well also if there were character- 
istic bits of ore and minerals ; marble, glass without too sharp 
edges, and even coal, and a few of the more common or easily 
obtainable fossils and arrowheads. To realize what stones 
mean to the natural child, read Acher.^ That tells the story. 
He shows, too, what strings, points, edges, clubs, etc., have 
meant for the race and mean to-day for children. The chil- 
dren might occasionally be shown the many clever things that 
can be done, and not too much protected so that there would 
never be any bruises or petty accidents. Thus the propensity 
to build, classify, exercise the aesthetic taste, work, develop the 
strong muscles, learn something about minerals, mines, rocks, 
mountains could be guided and developed by talks and model 
exercises. Some stones could be named and tales of the Mythic 
and Stone Age, and some rudiments of what will later become 
interest in lithology could be developed by lessons from the 
rocks. Such a stone and woodyard in a school could teach 
many invaluable lessons and stimulate tendencies. For the 
older children, there could be joined framework, boards, and 
other material to be put together without nails into houses 
large enough for the children to get into and enjoy, and then 
taken down and reconstructed. There should, of course, also be 
bricks for building as well as stones. 

Snow in its season is as valuable for constructive play as 
sand or clay, is more plastic, and young children should be in- 



^ R. A. Acher, Spontaneous Constructions, etc., Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1910, 
Vol. 21, pp. 114-150. 



24 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

sured a good deal of experience with molding snowballs and 
various other figures, making snow men, forts, imprinting 
their own figure in it, making pictures, and letters, mapping out 
cart wheels and other patterns for games, digging and tunnel- 
ing in drifts, rolling and leaping in it, etc. Snow has peda- 
gogic possibilities that are not yet realized. The kind of play 
it prompts is under the very best conditions, for the ground is 
padded and cushioned and so incites to new motor activities. 
The analysis of snow air shows it to be the purest from germs, 
most prophylactic and stimulating, while the cold adds its 
wondrous tonic, sending the blood inward to stimulate all the 
vital organs, and then by reaction bringing it to the surface 
again in the most healthful way. Thus a snow field is on the 
whole a better environment for play, and a more tonic kind of 
play, even than a grassy lawn. Like those with wood and 
stone, snow plays are a rich, rank soil as yet but little cultivated 
by the programmists. If anyone doubts, the strength of the 
instinct and its possibilities, here again read Acher ^ on the sub- 
ject, which as a collection of the most commonplace and obvi- 
ous facts which only our artifact pedagogues or neurotically 
tender-hearted parents could ever have lost sight of is a mas- 
terpiece. Of course older children may profit yet more here, 
but the educative influence of these uncurricularized experi- 
ences is incalculable. 

Mari Hofer has shown much genial ingenuity in devising school- 
room plays and games that combine body culture, dramatic action, 
rhythm, and imagination." After a forest walk, e. g., she vivifies the 
memory of it by having the children pool each incident they can 
recall and state, and then rehearse it in action plays, walking, e. g., 
on heels or on toes as over mud, jumping puddles and ditches, climb- 
ing fences, pulling down branches, scuffing through leaves, piling 
them up and making bonfires and dancing about them, etc. They 
may even visit the farm in imagination and climb into wagons, 
teeter, drive, then run over the pasture, play horse, hunt eggs, milk 
cows, churn, fodder, each perhaps with half a dozen movements and 
with music. Or they may ride on carts, merry-go-rounds, swing, 
visit the seashore, play and paddle in the water, bathe, swim, fish; 

' R. A. Acher, Spontaneous Constructions, etc., Am. Jour, of Psy., Jan., 1910, 
Vol. 21, pp. 1 14-150. 

^ Plays and Games for Indoors and Out, Belle Ragnar Parsons. N. Y., A. S. 
Barnes, 215 p., 1909. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 25 

or again, gather apples, make cider, cut, thresh, and bind grain, husk 
corn, harvest pumpkins, watermelons, pick nuts, dig potatoes, dance 
about the Maypole with harvest songs. Again, they mimic plowing 
and pretend to sow seed, to cultivate* it, water gardens, pick flowers, 
graft. Or they may act out primitive cave and tree life, throw, 
shoot, hunt, kill, skin animals, dress hides, make clothes, weapons, 
baskets and pottery, build wigwams, follow trails, give war dances, 
play soldier, go Christmas shopping, prepare the Christmas tree, go 
to reindeer land, play in and with imaginary snow, act out the 
jointed doll, the Chinese mandarin. Jack in the box, skate, slide, 
play soldier, drill, make and break camp, wear uniforms, become 
cowboys, play each familiar musical instrument, cut down trees and 
saw wood. There are also games with the wmd, and the children 
can almost fancy themselves clouds, rain, flowers, or trees. They 
make maple sugar in thirteen stages; bake, brew, shoe horses, make 
barrels, live in lumber camps, go to sea, are masons, carpenters, 
shoemakers, and thus act out nearly every characteristic human vo- 
cation. Perhaps even earlier they have singular capacity for imag- 
ining themselves about every kind of animal they know. They 
wriggle like fish, leap like frogs, roar like lions, run like colts, growl 
like bears, and all the rest. They can even roll imaginary hoops 
and play with fancied marbles or trains, so that almost every kind 
of movement which they can possibly form any conception of is 
laid under tribute. Then there is the large body of folk games and 
carols. These are often sandwiched in with pictures, morning talks, 
nature material, stories, all kinds of gifts and occupations, all with 
unity enough for effectiveness and for harmony of the manifold 
elements, but without danger of interfering with freedom by hyper- 
methodic completeness and system. All is suggestion and stimula- 
tion and the concomitant action of the mind and of the body — each 
spurs on the other to do its best, thus securing very high culture 
value and affording phyletic recapitulation an opportunity to do its 
beneficent work. The richness and variety of the feeling involved 
in such activities without excessive insistence upon special features 
is admirably adapted to the tender, early stages of nascency of all 
the powers of the microcosmic soul of childhood. It involves dis- 
cipline without ceasing to be play. It vivifies myth and fills songs 
with a good body of material. 

We would broaden it yet a little more and even act plays of 
battles, funerals, weddings, church, some crimes, trials, punishments, 
possibly having goody children act out the bad roles, remembering 
that sometimes feigning evils weakens their hold upon the child's 
soul ; also, conversely, the rough children might play tender parts. 
In no educational stage can humanity be so completely or so advan- 
tageously orbed out to its full dimensions. Sympathy with all sorts 
and conditions of men has thus widened the whole periscope of 
human nature. It also performs moral choice and destinies. Aban- 
don in such activities, though some of them be questionable, can, 



26 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

we opine, in many cases have only the best results for strong and 
vigorous children, and surely to their interests those of the neurotic 
should be sacrificed, if either must yield to the other. In the kin- 
dergarten we should seek the minimum of repression and the maxi- 
mum of liberty. Even to be a little bad occasionally brings out 
correctives that slumber in each individual that his playmates are so 
ready to help him develop. 

The intellectual method of kindergarten thought needs re- 
adjustment. It must be made accessible to the scientific move- 
ment of the age, which has only lately touched it. It must 
study and profit by the marvelous School of Infancy, which 
Comenius, long before Froebel, and no less wisely, devised. 
It should cultivate children, not in pots, but in gardens. It 
must study the nature of the child, and abate its cult of an 
attenuated symbolism. Every child should have opened and 
kept for it, during its entire kindergarten course, a life-and- 
health book — such as I have elsewhere described, for the re- 
cording of the results of some physical examinations. As Rus- 
kin has well pointed out, symmetry has its dangers, which 
should be recognized. The kindergarten needs not more knowl- 
edge of, and loyalty to, genetic psychology, but there should be 
more attention to, and a closer interest in, and sympathy with, 
educational work and organization for other grades. More col- 
lege women are needed. There is also more sentiment and less 
sentimentality — a truer conception of the child, not as trailing 
clouds of glory and faintly understanding everything, but as 
a lovely little animal, full of helplessness, incapacity, and 
ignorance, but also of boundless potentialities. Every educa- 
tor, even the university professor, will profit by a careful study 
of the kindergarten. The enthusiasm and love of children on 
which it is based are the very greatest needs in these higher 
grades. Froebel should lead the present marvelous movement 
of advance, and not be dragged at its chariot wheels. 

I would invoke our wisest mothers, who most glorify the 
home by the light of their life and example, to let it shine into 
this institution, which is nearer to the home than any other. 
I would invite college graduates, seeking a vocation where 
they can bring to bear all the best that an academic career "has 
taught them, to consider whether the need of more educated 
leaders here does not constitute a call to them. I would call 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 27 

the attention of literary women, and of leaders in all the re- 
forms that tend to the development of a sphere for woman as 
complete and fitted to her activities as man-made institutions 
are to his, to shed the light of their sympathies and intuitions 
upon the kindergarten, which has a development in this country 
far beyond that of any other; and I would urge my profes- 
sional colleagues in my own department, seeking a field where 
philosophy can be supplied, to consider this. Froebel himself 
left his work unfinished ; and what he has done needs a higher 
interpretation, that his spirit be not strangled by his letter. 
The fight for recognition of the kindergarten is now being won 
all along the line, but the movement is still too much dominated 
by its scribes and sophists, so that a wide and vigorous co- 
operative effort is needed, lest the unfinished window of Alad- 
din's tower remain unfinished. 

V. — Within the last decade, kindergarten theory and prac- 
tice have happily begun to transcend the "limitations of Froebel 
and have made many new departures in this country. The 
concentrationists' programmes focus everything — morning 
talk, gifts, occupations, plays, games, perhaps singing and prac- 
tical work — it may be for days upon some single topic — a great 
man, event, natural object, animal, fairy tale, process, etc. 
About each of these cores, supposed to be more or less typical, 
there are questions, illustrations, morals, songs, etc., aiming 
to develop apperception centers and to give unity to the many 
parts as well as definiteness to details. Kindergartners have 
shown great originality and made many individual variations 
in the selection and treatment of such themes, and it would be 
strange indeed if some were not ill adapted to the child's stage 
of development or were not hypermethodic ; and to those who 
still hold that Froebel found the only true alphabet of childish 
activities, these new departures seem shocking and dangerous. 
Perhaps the worst aspect of this tendency is seen in the ultra- 
analytic treatment of tales and story roots by our Herbartians 
like De Garmo, with their sharply defined stages of analysis, 
synthesis, association, systematization, and application. What 
can be more unnatural and disenchanting than such a " six-step 
movement " applied to everything, e. g. to Grimm's M'drchen? 
Such pedantic pedagogy almost suggests paranoia. The story 
is no longer a story but a ghastly skeleton. Assimilative proc- 



28 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

esses mostly take care of themselves at this stage if the right 
material is vividly presented. Herbart's culture stages are 
excellent, first crude guesses at what is now so much better 
known than in his day; but his conceptions are now obsolete 
and fit only those pedagogic minds which are in a state either 
of arrest or degeneration. Observation during the last decade 
or two, both here and abroad, shows that educators who remain 
loyal to Herbart suffer not only arrest but retrogression. His 
psychology gave a new and useful concept of the struggle of 
ideas among themselves to get into consciousness, which Taine 
made very helpful to psychology especially in its abnormal 
forms, and which is laid under tribute by the nascent psychol- 
ogy of the future represented by the Freud school. But to-day 
this science is coming to be based more and more upon the 
affective life, which is the all-dominating factor and for which 
Herbart left very little room. Thus his theories, like those of 
Froebel, have now little more than historical interest, and all 
the once vital contributions of both are so far transcended that, 
to hark back to Froebel for knowledge of childhood or to Her- 
bart for formulae to interpret educational processes or mental 
disorders, are only products of the instinct of self-preservation 
in minds which, however active, are checked in their develop- 
ment and find the vaster problems of to-day too complex to 
adjust to. They have lost touch with the present in the sense 
which Janet has lately made so significant as the prodromal 
stage of psychic dissolution. 

Ten years ago there appeared an interesting experiment * 
in which, during two twenty-minute recesses, kindergarten 
children were given opportunity for perfectly free play, instead 
of the regular regimentized Froebelian games. There were 
plenty of toys and the children were actually allowed to do what 
they pleased. So successful was this test that the directors of 
it gradually extended this recess opportunity to a part of the 
school time and allowed the children to choose their kindergar- 
ten material, games, songs, and to converse freely about them 
and to amuse themselves under the guidance of the teacher, so 
that imposition from them was at least greatly lessened. Only 



^ A Study of the Kindergarten Problem, by F. Burk and C. F. Burk (with 
many cobperators), The Whitaker & Ray Co., San Francisco, 1S99, 123 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 29 

a small per cent of these children chose the sphere and cubes; 
and in general, although tried only a year, the experiment was 
highly suggestive, for it showed how real children differ from 
the manikin children of the Froebelian metaphysicians with 
more theory than motherhood in their souls, who have been 
trained to see in the dark, and often deep, sayings of the child- 
less sage of Keilhau the last syllable of recorded wisdom, and 
one of whom is said to have advised kindergartners to read 
him on their knees. These happy Santa Barbara children loved 
to play animals, as all healthy children do and should. This 
instinct Miss Blow thinks it fair to describe and condemn as 
willingness to let children " transform themselves into sneaking 
foxes and writhing rattlesnakes," ^ and would ^forbid all such 
relapses to the feral stage. These children also imitated many 
adult occupations in play. This, too, is. Miss Blow thinks, all 
wrong, because education ought to " deliver from the coercion 
of heredity." These children, even the orthodox, neglected the 
sacred circle, drew rough pictures rather than tight forms, cut 
out inartistic models from paper, played with strings, old boxes, 
leaves, flowers, feathers, became victims of manifold wild ca- 
prices and flouted much of the " traditional material." Worst 
of all, as if bedeviled, they illustrated the recapitulation theory 
instead of resisting nature; and this "yielded fatal results," for 
the chief lesson of life is " restraint and renunciation." Now, 
in fact, nothing is better established in a broad and general way 
than the recapitulation theory, manifold as are its gaps and 
exceptions ; and the same is true of the law " from fundamental 
to accessory movements," which in the last decade has greatly 
modified kindergarten practice in most of the best kindergar- 
tens abroad." No one who knows modern biology, or the laws 
of inheritance, or criminology, or psychopathology, in all of 
which these principles are cardinal, has ever dreamed of deny- 
ing this basal truth ; for all evolutionists know that every misfit 
and exception requires and often has a special explanation; 

' Blow, Susan E.: Educational Issues in the Kindergarten, N. Y., Appleton, 
1908, 386 p. This is probably the ablest work this country has produced on 
the kindergarten and taken with Miss N. C. Vandewalker's admirable and com- 
prehensive survey (The Kindergarten in American Education, Macmillan, N. Y., 
1908, 274 p.) precludes the necessity of multiplying references to literature, or fur- 
ther description of present status and problems here. 



30 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and all such facts usually prove the rule. To argue, as Miss 
Blow does so earnestly, that to admit that children pass through 
lower stages in repeating the history of the race is a plea for 
allowing positive immorality in them, is too preposterous for 
consideration. 

The industrialists seek to curriculize cooking, washing, 
ironing, perhaps for dolls, and many other forms of human 
occupation. Miss Dopp ^ bases her programme on the principle 
that " those racial activities which are most ancient and most 
prolonged have had the most potent influence in determining 
the attitude of mankind." " Industry is the matrix that holds 
within itself the other interests of life." Household precede 
vocational industries. Miss Patty Hill, than whom this coun- 
try has produced no more sane and thoughtful exponent of 
the kindergarten, who deserves to be called the leader of the 
now ascendant progressives, as Miss Blow is of the conserva- 
tives, the publication of whose exposition is awaited with 
peculiar interest, recognizes that work done for, has a very 
different effect from the same work later done by, the child. 
We must provide the child with racial experience in which its 
own narrow life is often so pathetically poor. We must admit 
that the stories of primitive times are not very well told by 
Miss Dopp; but her principle is a sound and valuable one, 
though her stories do need to be reformed. The Pestalozzi- 
Froebel-Haus in Berlin applies this principle in some respects 
better. 

John Dewey carries the industrial principle still further.^ 
The school should be a typical community and would fit for 
social life by engaging in it. As Femly says : "The appropriate 
food for each of our spontaneous interest is the mass of ideas 
that engaged the ancestors to whom the instinctive interest is 
due." Such activities are the articulating centers of life. 
Early and basal occupations are the " points of departure 
whence the children shall be led out into realization of the 



^ Dopp, K. E.: The Place of Industries in Elementary Education. University 
Press, Chicago, 1903, 208 p. 

^ Dewey, John: The School and Society. University Press, Chicago, 1907, 
125 p. The Child and the Curriculum. University Press, Chicago, 1902, 40 p. 
The Ethical Principles Underlying Education. University Press, Chicago, 1903, 
34 P- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 31 

historical development of man." Thns construction rather 
than absorption of knowledge should be the end; and on the 
basis of cooperation and the spirit of service, science, art, and 
literature can best be evolved. This idea has been put to work 
with a hundred children and the result has made a real con- 
tribution to educational theory and practice. It fadges well 
with what may be called the lower pragmatism that is not 
identical with but opposed to humanism. But it has not ad- 
justed the industrial occupations to the stages of child develop- 
ment, i. e., it puts some too early and some too late and often 
inverts their true order. It also overemphasizes some and neg- 
lects other industrial recapitulatory elements. ^ But its chief 
shortcoming is in its failure to realize how young children, with 
no opportunity for social selection, assimilate well-chosen 
myths and literary rudiments, and how disconnected and inde- 
pendent such thoughts are from all forms of industry. 

The disciples of Miss Blow, and they are many, feel that 
Herbart and his followers, Dewey and his group, Schiller, 
James, and all pragmatists as well as Darwinists, and my own 
poor efforts and those who may have been affected by them, to 
whom Miss Blow gives so much attention, all geneticists, labor- 
atory psychologists, and, most of all, students of childhood, are 
dangerous and are striving to seduce kindergartners from the 
straight and narrow way laid down by Froebel that leads to 
the true fold, for they all strive to foist alien ideas and proc- 
esses from without instead of to develop from within. Miss 
Blow is honest, sincere, able, well-endowed with and dominated 
by the instinct of leadership, and so uncompromising that she 
would ostracize, if she could, from every programme of 
teachers' meetings, those who urge views that are divergent 
from those she deems sound. Her discussions often trans- 
cend the kindergarten field; and she is one of the dwindling 
number of educational thinkers who represent in this practical 
land the now very attenuated influence of the German idealism 
of Kant, Fichte, and Hegel. Such knights of the Holy Ghost 
are looking backward and not forward. Happily, the kinder- 
garten has at last broken away from the narrow lines they 
prescribed for it and has entered the broad field of education, 
so that instead of being isolated, it is becoming interested in all 
important movements in this wider field. It is because the kin- 



32 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

dergarten horizon was in its early days kept so narrow that 
now in this day of sudden and unwonted freedom from philo- 
sophical schematism, there are just now some extravagances 
and many trialette schemes of very diverse merits; but this is 
not only inevitable but well, for all true progress is by the 
method of trial and error. It is high time that this emancipa- 
tion occurred, for there are large arrears left over from the 
old days of bondage to be made up. New and able leaders, not 
one but many, are rising who are throwing to the winds the old 
prejudices and who know and sympathize with the best that is 
new as well as with the old. The next decade or two will see 
far more remarkable advances in both theory and practice than 
have taken place during the last quarter of a century. 

VI. — Turning now to kindergartens in Europe, attendance 
is always and everywhere voluntary. In England and France, 
the only two countries where infant schools are a part of the 
State system, children may attend from three to five, at which 
latter age England is the only country in the world to compel 
attendance (the legal age usually being six, only Scandinavian 
lands placing it at seven). In the Ecoles Maternelles children 
can enter as early as two. In all other countries the kindergar- 
ten is either supported by the locality, which is often compelled 
by law to do this, or else it is a private venture for gain or 
charity, or connected with social settlement work, and is most 
provided for the very poor. In both the above State systems, 
children below school age — i. e., five in England and between 
five and six in France — receive elementary training in reading, 
writing, and number along with other work, while in Sweden 
and Norway, where compulsion begins at seven, the kindergar- 
ten has taken little root, and those who attend the few institu- 
tions provided before this age draw, model, do cardboard and 
sand work, play, weave, baste, practice simple gymnastics, but 
do not attempt preliminary school work. Thus the latter, 
which in England sometimes begins before five, comes here 
after seven. In Germany school work is positively forbidden 
in these institutions. 

In the Maternal Schools of France and the kindergartens 
of Germany as well as of the United States, the children usu- 
ally stay only from three to five hours daily and are grouped, 
guided, and taught, and their activities are for the most part 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 33 

controlled. Meals are rarely served. Where there are after- 
noon sessions, to avoid the waste of unoccupied rooms, they are 
usually attended by other teachers or by the older children, and 
often have a different staff, teachers spending their free time 
in visiting parents, holding meetings for mothers, who are 
sometimes even taught kindergarten occupations, etc. Thus 
this American type has little of the day-nursery spirit, which 
was instituted originally to care for children whose mothers 
were at work (Bewahranstalt or Asyle). Here the nurse is 
more prominent than the teacher ; the children are kept longer, 
perhaps eleven or twelve hours ; there is less control ; they are 
fed, washed, given a good midday sleep; more attention is 
paid to their physical needs, etc. It is fortunately more and 
more impossible to draw hard and fast lines between institu- 
tions of this origin and the three- or four-hour kindergartens 
described above. If the one has adhered more closely to Froe- 
bel's letter, the other when at its best better exemplifies his 
spirit. 

In comparing the American kindergartens with those of 
Europe, the far greater variety and better adaptation to the 
nature and needs of children in the latter are painfully apparent. 
The scheduled .of many Continental kindergartens not only pro- 
vide for walks, but often have a curriculum of them with hints 
for observation, which are taken nearly every pleasant day. 
In many of them there are ample tree-planted playgrounds and 
covered spaces, also playrooms besides a garden. Often we 
find a large number of toys provided as a part of the equip- 
ment of the institution, balls, dolls, skipping ropes, spades, pails, 
wheelbarrows, molds for sand or clay, water pots, various 
seeds, individual flower pots, also plots, wall pictures, picture 
books, a few simple mechanical tools — all these besides the 
standard Froebel apparatus. In some places the children make 
simple toys. Choicer ones are given them to pl^y with only on 
certain days of the week. There are often pet animals, both 
caged and free, which the children may care for or feed. In 
some of these foreign kindergartens, there are tanks, aquaria, 
and even small ponds with fish, turtles, ducks, frogs, toads, etc., 
and sometimes dogs, cats, and even kids and goats with their 
harnesses and wagons. If there are botanical gardens or 
especially zoological parks, they are visited and utilized peda- 
4 



34 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

gogically to the utmost. In the playgrounds, rooms, and spaces 
there are usually benches around the wall, sometimes provided 
with a back. Playrooms are often provided with a large num- 
ber of mats, on which the children have their midday nap, 
when all is kept dark and quiet, the teacher or nurse going 
about in felt shoes. 

There is already a small but interesting literature on toys 
(although far less than on games), and several toy congresses 
have been held. In richness, variety, instructiveness, and in- 
genuity, German toys exceed all others. To this fascinating 
and important topic, the American kindergarten has made no 
contribution and has given little or no attention, while in pic- 
tures we are far behind.^ 

Day nurseries now often employ a kindergartner part of 
the day or take their children to kindergarten for a few hours, 
while the kindergartens often receive children before and keep 
them after the regular period, perhaps employ a nurse, and in 
general pay more attention to the children's physical needs. In 
France, there must be a caisse d'ccolcs raised by subscription 
or local appropriation from which the children are fed, bring- 
ing a part of their meal and receiving the rest, helping about 
its preparation or in the school kitchen. Sometimes there is a 
special dining room. In Germany boiled or otherwise modified 
milk is sometimes supplied gratis, and dietaries are selected and 
food prepared with great care. A Warterin or femme de ser- 
vice, it may be, washes and bathes the children, especially in the 
s-ummer, superintends the lavatories, etc. In Austria and else- 
where, a doctor examines the children monthly, and his services 
and the medicine are free. The children, too, are periodically 
weighed and measured to see if they are growing normally, 
and all these data are recorded in a life and health book kept 
for each child. Occasionally we find a school medicine chest. 
Elsewhere apprentices, who may be pupils in the Normal 
School, serve in the kindergarten ; and less frequently those 
studying to be nurses serve in the day nursery. The former 
institutions especially are learning much from the latter. 

' See A. S. Fischer, Der Kindergarten, A. Holder, Wien, 1907. Also Report 
on Kindergarten Work Abroad, by the English Froebel Society, 1909, based on 
an international inquiry made in 1907. Bd. of Ed. Special Reports on Ed. Sub- 
jects, Vol. 22, 1909, pp. 203-283. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 35 

The rapprochement between the two institutions, as well as 
infant classes, asylums, creches, and all other institutions that 
care for young children, is most wholesome, for the infant 
needs to be treated as a whole, body and soul, and all specializa- 
tion should be avoided or deferred. While specific day nurser- 
ies are much inferior in Europe, as Mrs. Arthur Dodge has 
shown, the kindergarten has in some localities adopted and in- 
corporated the day nurseries so that the best features of the 
latter are found in the former. At least the main core of care 
and provision should be very large and common, and the differ- 
ential features should be relatively slight. Children need all 
that is good in all these institutions. In the day nursery, the 
ideals of health are supreme, as they should be everywhere; 
while the kindergarten is dropping its aloofness and profiting 
by the rapidly rising tide of interest in and knowledge of 
hygiene. Progress here is vital in view of the fact that one 
fifth of all children die before reaching the age of five. In 
Italy the Aporti methods of kindergarten lay greater stress 
upon recreation than upon work, infant gymnastics are stressed, 
and there is more free play than in the more conservative in- 
stitutions. In Holland, the so-called Leyden method empha- 
sizes children's hand and garden work, drawing, etc., with a 
view to developing their own spontaneous activities ; while the 
Rotterdam method brings the teachers and intellectual training 
to the foreground. Mothers' congresses are usually and natur- 
ally more interested in the nursery and the child, and perhaps 
women's clubs incline to lay more stress upon the kindergarten 
ideas, the former fearing that the present higher education of 
women trains them away from home life, are now urging that 
college departments be established where young women shall 
be trained in all that pertains to motherhood, children, and 
child care, as well as in academic branches, and that all women 
students, especially those who would teach, should not disdain 
but desire to come in contact with young children in a health- 
ful, practical way and qualify to enter day nurseries and kin- 
dergartens and to combine their best features, to know some- 
thing about children, their teething and teeth, about the milk 
supply and the many problems that center in it, atypical and 
subnormal children, common diseases, emergencies — cuts, 
bruises, burns, bandages, etc. They should be able to answer 



36 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

intelligently earnest practical questions of young mothers on 
such topics as hammocks, perambulators, orthopedics, institu- 
tions, weaning, whether the teaser or false nipple causes ade- 
noids, midwives, the regimen for impending motherhood, par- 
ental care, and do extensive service generally. They should 
be solicitous for the social as well as the sanitary environment 
of the child, learn to do neighborhood and home work, so they 
can be not only teachers but foster mothers interested in chil- 
dren's welfare during the entire twenty-four hours, extending 
down to tenderer years the hygienic care now taken during the 
school age, insisting that all be properly fed at home or in 
school before they can be properly taught. They should know 
a little of the important charity agencies, social settlements, 
outpatient hospital work, that pertains to children, and all the 
other scores of organizations designed for their welfare, so as 
to be resourceful. 

The most cursory survey of foreign conditions shows that 
the conservative American kindergarten is far too isolated, its 
training schools too highly specialized and narrow, and its 
spirit too academic to render the best service to the greatest 
number in the community. Its animus and method to-day no 
whit more represent the true Froebel than Aquinas or Calvin 
did the true Jesus ; and in perusing the most systematic of our 
kindergarten literature, the question incessantly arises whether 
these sapient writers can possibly ever have carefully read 
Froebel, whom the nine points enumerated, I believe, truly rep- 
resent, but which the main., drift of their writings so often 
directly contradicts. As only parts of his tomes have been 
translated into English, his scriptures are at least withheld 
from the laity, and I have begun to question whether any one, 
not only of them but of the leaders have truly, candidly, and 
completely read him. They have of course glanced over some 
of the familiar proof texts that illustrate their own views ; and 
Froebel, it must be confessed, is so full of uncoordinated, if 
not opposite, apergiis that his harmonists will never entirely 
agree. If my interpretation of him be correct, he would be 
appalled and horrified at much that he would find in the average 
American kindergarten and would vastly prefer a good day 
nursery. Indeed, I fear that the university patronage and at- 
mosphere, in which kindergarten exposition has lately been 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 37 

placed in several centers of learning has injured rather than 
increased its practical efficiency and made it more apart and 
theoretical, and weakened its ideal of social service which ought 
to be paramount. It is doubtful if Froebel could possibly have 
been successful as a professor, and had he done so his message 
to the world would have been impaired, although like Pesta- 
lozzi or General Booth he would have had pithy and pregnant 
things to say occasionally to academic circles. Froebel was 
not a philosopher or thinker any more than he was a scientific 
student or observer of childhood, nor was he a great organizer, 
but a deep-souled mystic with the mind of a poet, not very virile, 
but with a good touch of the best femininity in his soul. He 
loved and yearned for poor and neglected children, to whom he 
would fill the place of father and mother, and he divined their 
nature more deeply than anyone had ever done before. His 
sagacity in many points has since been demonstrated by science 
to have been prophetic, but his horizon was limited, his opin- 
ions often fallible, and in general far inadequate to the vast- 
ness and complexity of the infant soul. Hence to-day they are 
in crying need of being supplemented, amplified, occasionally 
corrected, and in some definite respects abandoned. He 
thought and felt much as the best women think and feel. By 
his knowledge of the child he also came to know and to pro- 
foundly affect the motherly element in woman's soul as few 
men have ever done ; and so for those to whom motherhood is 
denied, he is a most wholesome ideal whom it seems to many 
of them hardly less than sacrilegious to uncrown, since this 
kind of devotion tolerates no suggestion of imperfection in its 
object and the thought of any possible rival is intolerable. 
Woman loves an authority to appeal to, whom she can accept 
without reserve and from whom there is no appeal; and the 
American kindergartners have too often come to accept and 
quote what Froebel said, did, and meant, as interpreted by 
them, almost as holy writ, until now the new and higher criti- 
cism of his text by child study, that would reinterpret his letter 
by his spirit, raise everything to a higher plane, and give us a 
new and truer Froebel, is repugnant to them. They should 
consider it as fortunate that the critics are disposed to take the 
humbler attitude of fulfilling rather than that of destroying his 
evangel. 



38 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

When the stereotyped kindergartner learns that in the 
Transvaal, e. g., the children often spend the entire day out of 
doors, take naps on rugs, in camp chairs, or on the leaves under 
the trees, as in the forest schools for tuberculous children, or 
that they are encouraged by appeals to their parents to sleep in 
or out of the open window the year around ; that in Denmark 
sometimes stress is laid upon box beds of a peculiar hygienic 
make ; that elsewhere emphasis is laid upon swings to cultivate 
rhythm with all its deep meanings, upon teeters, seesaws, 
merry-go-rounds, or rocking-horses ; that sometimes the cot- 
tage system, and elsewhere gallery lessons loom up in im- 
portance; or that the systematic study of the environment is 
made paramount here, or dusting, sweeping, bedmaking, and 
other housekeeping activities there; that some find precious 
educational values in making dolls' clothes ; that there are 
places where the instruction in the vernacular to those of 
foreign birth or parentage is made the chief feature ; that nearly 
all forms of fine work and small objects have been banished 
by positive enactment from the German schools, and from 
many others by general consent ; that sometimes wall charts or 
brush work, or again free play, or certain topics of child study 
are now introduced and actively cultivated ; that in some places, 
perhaps most in Japan, the kindergartens for the poor and for 
the rich are so radically differentiated as to have little in com- 
mon; that douches, boiled water, separate towels, making of 
artificial flowers, knitting stockings, are cultivated ; that for the 
poor the kindergarten is sometimes kept open all the year round 
as well as all day ; and that often elsewhere the rooms are oc- 
cupied all day in relays of both children and teachers ; or that 
the curriculum varies radically with the seasons; that in some 
places all attempts at system or uniformity have been thrown 
to the winds, and that the teacher's personal conviction of 
applicability leads; or that matter dominates form — these 
things cause in many of our kindergartners an uncomfortable 
feeling that such doings are not according to Froebel and there- 
fore are questionable. 

Vn. — Froebel said : " Wouldst thou lead the child . . . 
Observe him and he will show thee what to do," and yet we 
cannot and must not forget that a dark cloud of ignorance 
hangs over the kindergarten age. Some scores of individual 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 39 

studies have been made upon infants from birth on, often up to 
the third year, and collective studies of children from the begin- 
ning of the school age on are far more common. But the child 
of from about two and a half or three to five or six years of age 
is relatively unknown to science. Of no stage of human life do 
we know so little. The kindergarten has contributed almost 
nothing to child study and has been less affected by it than 
any other grade of education up to the university. Even the 
growth rate, diseases, development of language, spontaneous 
games, plays, automatisms, runaways, powers of control, 
rhythm, fatigue, ear-, eye- and motor-mindedness, conceptions 
of nature, man, nascent religious ideas, the nature of imagina- 
tion, faults, capacities, etc. — each might be illuminated by a 
single thoroughgoing investigation. Till such is made the kin- 
dergarten will not be unlike an air plant with no roots in earth- 
ly soil. Its principles and practice will lack all scientific basis 
and control, while tests and standards will remain impossible. 
There is no authority or recognized criterion on anything in 
it and now that it has definitely broken with the hide-bound 
dogmatic orthodoxy of the Froebelian Epigoni and has en- 
tered upon a larger trial and error stage, this lack is more pal- 
pable and deplorable. In higher grades of education many 
things can now be proven and many questions are settled by 
appeals to researches that are authoritative, for experimental 
didactics has laid certain foundations that seem to stand firm, 
but here nothing of the kind exists. Miss Blow bases on Froe- 
bel and philosophical principles; I, who hold almost the oppo- 
site opinions, base them upon what is known of children before 
and after this age, and infer from this as best I can; the most 
sagacious and practical kindergartners in this country now base 
their views upon native, womanly intuition into the nature and 
needs of this metamorphic age. But none of us can prove our- 
selves right by citing more than two or three studies of this 
period. Till there are such data we must go on by the same 
methods of tact and sympathy that have prevailed ever since 
savagery in the training of children, with only the addi- 
tional light that progress in other fields reflects into this obscure 
region. Is it ungallant to suggest that this state of things is 
purely due to the fact that no man equipped with modern 
methods has ever entered this field ? If so, should not provision 



40 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

be made at a few favored localities for training investigators 
to lay down conditions and direct studies so sadly needed here ? 
With so much ability and enthusiasm and so many methods 
now in operation it would seem that it needs but a touch of 
intelligent direction to redeem this rank, rich field for scientific 
pedagogy, for none is so inviting, so ripe, so certain of yielding, 
under proper cultivation, such precious results both for science 
and for education. 

Yet, and finally, a very few studies in this field must be men- 
tioned : Earl Barnes asked 420 boys and 346 girls, mostly five years 
old, whom they would wish to be like and why, and analyzed their an- 
swers/ Miss Louch found children in England often look with dis- 
like upon the position of grown-ups " ; " but in America even kin- 
dergarten children are striving toward their future estate." Most 
want to be like some relative (some thirty per cent of boys would 
be like their fathers and of girls like their mothers), and over ninety 
per cent at this age would be like some personal acquaintance. " In 
this study eighteen per cent of the boys chose women and girls as 
ideals, while but five per cent of the girls chose males; thus revers- 
ing the conditions which prevail later in life." Of girls, ninety-five 
per cent chose their own sex as ideals, showing that even from four 
to six sex fitness is more awakened in girls than in boys. Other 
evidence here gathered shows that " American children struggle 
away from their childhood more rapidly than do the children of any 
other nationality." Miss Young'' showed that in England children 
in the lower classes. have their attention fixed more closely and earlier 
on future vocations than have children of the freer classes. In this 
country this is probably less true among children of the native-born 
population than among those of immigrants. School means most, 
and home least, to Hebrew and Italian children. Barnes raises the 
question whether it may not be best sometimes to make the school 
the conscious ideal rather than the home, where the latter can never 
be made very good. American children do not, as a rule, put the 
school first. They also choose most ideals from romance and ani- 
mals, indicating a livelier imagination and freer attitude of mind, 
which goes with exemption from excessive poverty. The reasons 
for choices at this age are chiefly activity : they would be like father 
or mother because they work, or soldiers to fight, carpenters to saw, 

•Louch, Mary: Ideals of New York Kindergarten Children. Kindergarten 
Mag., 1903, Vol. 16, pp. 86-100. 

' Differences between Children and Grown-up People from the Child's Point 
of View. Ped. Sem., 1897, Vol. 5, pp. 129-135. 

^ Young, Sarah A.: A Study in Children's Social Environment. Barnes's 
Studies in Education, 1902, Vol. II, pp. 123-40. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF THE KINDERGARTEN 4i 

seals to flop in the water, pussy because she plays, a bird to fly, a 
policeman to arrest folks, a girl would be a boy so she could swear, 
etc. Often their ideals are expressed by vague words, like " nice," 
" smart," " good," etc. " Little children love to love rather than to 
be loved." They are not immoral but unmoral. The American 
father and the Italian and Irish mother are most attractive. 

If the kindergarten has done Httle to advance paidology, it 
is one of the best fields for the appHcation of its results; and 
the time is near when every reputable training school will have 
an expert in this work. Like the nearly two score other types 
of child-service agencies, local and national, lately convened at 
Clark University (June, 1909), the need is felt of making its 
work more professional and its theory more scientific, as well 
as of correlating child-welfare organizations in the interests 
of the unity of the child, and to avoid duplication and conflict 
between diverse aims and fields. Civilization is awakening to 
the fact that it is in danger of losing touch with the child, serv- 
ice to which is in a very pregnant biological sense the ultimate 
criterion of the worth of every human institution and endeavor. 
Hence the teacher can hardly think too highly of his or her 
calling. 



CHAPTER II 

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 

The idea of dancing — Children's interest in it — Dancing is a passion with 
old and young — A new type of motor-mindedness — A sketch of the 
history of dancing from ancient through mediaeval times — Its rela- 
tions to religion, also to myth and folklore — Our national poverty in 
festivals and their revival — Relations of dancing to gesture, play, 
love, war, history, gymnastics, rhythm, music, inflection, mimesis and 
pantomime — Use of expressive movements among primitive people — 
Greeting — Rituals — Imitations of vocations — A mode of expression 
for the feelings — Deaf-mute expression and pedagogy — Dancing as 
one of the chief expressions of the joy of life. 

Dancing I would describe as the liberal, humanistic culture 
of the emotions by motions. Feeling and movement not only- 
fit, but intensify each other, and to a degree, by changing either 
we change the other. Herein lies the great educational potency 
of dancing, and this makes it the best of all illustrations of har- 
mony between mind and body. If we wish to be Teutonically 
profound, we may say that the first vocal utterance, viz. : 
movement of the vocal organs, was only incidental to a dance. 
The first sound was an accident to the dance, seized on by the 
ear and developed into speech with all its music of poises and 
accelerations, stresses, accents, inflections, cadences, timbres, 
pitch, etc. Thus music, too, originally vocal, in this rather 
tenuous sense, had its origin in the dance. On the other hand, 
pantomime and mimesis were gestures appealing to the eye, 
and these, too, may become not only conventionalized but 
systemized. Although it may become a highly technical art, 
dancing is best conceived as an originally spontaneous mus- 
cular expression of internal states, primarily not with the pur- 
pose of imparting, but for the pleasure of expressing them. 
Thus the pedagogic value of dancing is to enlarge the emo- 
tional life by making all the combinations of movements that 
42 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 43 

it is mechanically possible for the body to make. Ordinary 
life, not only of work but even of play, leaves unused sets of 
activities, and as these atrophy the feeling — states that they 
express tend also to fade, and so life grows partial and frag- 
mentary, and we fail to experience all that our heredity makes 
possible. Thus all should dance in the sense above described 
for their own psychic welfare, for it helps the young to orb 
out the soul and keeps that of the aged from shriveling and 
invagination. Thus we have here another of the ways in 
which we draw upon the immeasurable wealth of life repre- 
sented in our pedigree and make the best and most vital in 
the careers of our long line of forebears live again in us. We 
resurrect their joys and bury or even perchance participate in 
their sorrows. Our age of drudgery and strain alternating 
with too passive pleasures knows little of the resources of 
dancing for education and all-sided development. Till the 
recent movements looking toward a revival of its pristine 
power, we had allowed it to dwindle to a pitiful relict. 

Most children begin to feel interest in dancing about the 
dawn of the school age, but chiefly in connection with acted 
stories and with music with strongly accented and simple 
rhythm. But this interest is languid until the adolescent re- 
construction is well under way, when zest for it is greatly rein- 
forced. Something is wrong with the boy or girl or their 
parents or teachers who cannot learn or does not love to dance 
in the middle teens. But the sexes are inclined to very 
different types, girls taking to the graceful and more conven- 
tional, and boys to the more extravagant and even original, 
e. g., clog, gymnastic, cake-walk forms. Instructors have not 
sufficiently recognized these marked diversities near the begin- 
ning of the nascent period for dancing. From Mrs. Barber's 
questionnaire issued here and answered by many instructors and 
experts in the art, and from other sources, it is plain that there 
are occasionally born geniuses who love it, dance when alone 
for pure enjoyment, and sometimes teach themselves. In many 
small theaters on amateur nights, which offer an open stage 
and prizes to all comers, one occasionally sees not only much 
expertness but on rare occasions real originality, and always 
intense interest. Rarely indeed do we see among professional 
stage dancers a true artist born and made, but when such an 



44 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

one appears and startles the audience by creative talent, then 
we awaken to a thrilling sense of what the higher poetry of 
motion may mean and do. Its great psychotherapeutic value 
when stimulated or inspired by good music is beyond all ques- 
tion. Although excitable and maniacal cases may be over- 
wrought and profound melancholiacs unaffected, its influence 
is growingly appreciated, not only for the patients who par- 
ticipate, but for those who only look on. Its prophylactic value 
is probably greater than we yet realize. In home and school I 
would plead not only for more of it but especially for more of 
its cruder and unconventional forms in their season, such as 
free if sometimes wild capering, cavorting, acting with plenty 
of facial mimesis, for this not only allows awkwardness and 
self-consciousness to cover itself and removes repression, but 
gives flexibility to muscles and facilitation or Bahnimg to 
nerve tracts. Too rigid insistence upon the proprieties and 
often stilted formalities of the dance seems to the growing 
boy in the awkward age a very formidable affair, and rather 
than try to train himself to it he is liable to turn away from 
dancing entirely before he has fairly felt its full charm. First 
of all, then, there should be incitement to move freely and 
vigorously under the stimulus of music and, for the sluggish, 
music of an irresistible kind. When this old association be- 
tween music and motion is well established, then refinements 
may begin. 

.^ Nor for young people must the phenomenon of second 
breath in dancing be regarded as either a symptom or a prov- 
ocation of hysteria or nervousness, although it may be so in 
neurotic cases. This phenomenon for the young who are en- 
tirely normal is probably promotive of arterial' and cardiac 
elasticity. The abandon it brings must not be too wild or ex- 
treme, nor so prolonged as to bring excessive tire, for in this 
state the fatigue sense is itself fatigued and resources are over- 
drawn before we know it. But indulged in with temperance 
and duly controlled while it lasts, this experience is now 
thought not only to enlarge the circulatory and strengthen the 
nervous system, but also to lessen the proclivities to sex ereth- 
ism and in some degree to vicariate for it in a salutary way. 
The kind of tire it brings abates passion by providing for its 
tides more healthful muscular channels. This both answers to 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 45 

syllabi and personal conferences indicate. If danger is in- 
creased during the time of general excitement, it abates 
markedly afterwards, leaving not only the motor but the men- 
tal capacity for work under high tension and pressure aug- 
mented, and also increasing the probability of the subsequent 
sublation of temptation when it next arises in more spiritual 
forms. We meet thus here one aspect of the doctrine of the 
so-called higher powers of man, but from this standpoint can 
realize how signally James fails to understand what the above 
experience itself should teach, viz., that men who habitually 
live and work at their highest potentiation make themselves 
sterile, as according to Herbert Spencer all forms of over- 
individuation are inversely as genetic power. But this topic 
deserves more exhaustive psychological treatment than is in 
place here. 

V Again, empirical data show that nearly all are impelled to 
dance by some kinds, and that some are thus impelled by 
nearly all kinds of music. This fact has never been given 
an adequate psychological explanation. It can hardly be at 
root due merely to the tab-keeping instinct on which counting 
rests, which has its morbid exaggeration in arithmomania. 
Nor can it be explained by the fact that reiterated acoustic beats 
constitute a summation of stimuli that tend to motor discharge, 
although both these may enter as minor or secondary factors. 
It is probably chiefly because since primitive music was strongly 
rhythmic, the drum being perhaps the first instrument, it was 
long made by beating or for dancing and marching so that this 
association became inveterate, leg movement being the chief 
movement of the body under voluntary control. That cadenced 
steps constitute an apperception organ for certain kinds of 
music and bring it home to the soul far more than when it is 
inertly heard, there can be no doubt. Primitive song, too, 
may have been more intensely pantomimic than we know and 
used at first chiefly to eke out dramatic action. At any rate, 
here is a problem that cannot be explained by any known 
psychophysical apparatus or process in man to-day without 
recourse to psychogenesis. 

Again, from the studies of the revery-like imagery sug- 
gested by music it is plain that there is a very wide range of 
individual differences in these, so that the same sonata, e. g., 



46 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

suggests very different psychic scenery to different persons. 
Although we have not yet sufficient data to settle the problem, 
it is probable that the free motor interpretations of music by 
different dancers would be no less different. Motion, however, 
seems closer to music than is the scenic imagination, as well 
as capable of more adequate expression of it, and its translation 
into action has thus greater educational value. If music im- 
pels us to feel again the submerged experience of the race in a 
dim, confused, massive way, dancing impels us to act it out, 
and both probably represent a wider as well as a farther range 
backward into our phyletic history than does even play, con- 
sidered from the viewpoint of recapitulation. There are 
probably extremely motor-minded persons to whom perhaps 
about every kind of music has its own dance at least if we in- 
clude the stillness and quiescence positively prompted by it as 
in the above broad concept of dancing. While translation into 
motor terms undoubtedly helps to the understanding of most 
music, it is also certain that this applies on the whole best to 
music of a simpler kind. Complex and involved music im- 
pelling as it often does to different and often contradictory and 
otherwise impossible movements, it is, of course, vastly harder 
to interpret thus. Such music often suggests passive move- 
ments like hovering, floating, being swept by tides or swirling 
currents, or laid to rest, put to sleep, made contemplative and 
entranced, if not paralyzed. But the play upon the ranges and 
registers of not only voluntary but involuntary emotivation is 
incessant and the Hfe of feeling which it widens and enriches 
is gagged and repressed without at least incipient movement. 

Answers to syllabi show that not infrequently people in mid- 
dle and even later life develop a strong desire to dance, as did 
Socrates. This is not devolution or reversionary toward sec- 
ond childhood but a retarded or undeveloped impulse asserting 
itself. I have a few pathetic cases of clergymen and others who 
upon their first exposure to the charm of dancing, in the home, 
in school exhibitions, or in gymnasia, where some other name 
was given it, or even where it was first frankly seen and known 
as such upon the stage, were fascinated by its influence and 
filled with a pathetic sense of the innocent joy of life that might 
have been theirs, and sometimes have adopted rather fantastic 
ways to atone for their loss. The Greeks had dances for those 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 47 

in middle life, both men and women, as well as for the aged, 
which, like other choragic creations of antiquity, are, of course, 
lost. A poet interested in the intricacies of prosody or a musi- 
cian in the days before the diatonic system, when modes and 
modulations were so effective and the use of which is now 
largely lost, might well cultivate this art. But the spontaneous 
senescent infection with the Terpsichorean spell, which was 
not tarantism and not religious fanaticism, seems a unique 
phenomenon of rejuvenation. It is as salutary as it is inexplic- 
able. It is hardly comparable to restored normal vision or 
repigmentation of hair in the aged, and probably will not be 
explained till senescence is as well known as is adolescence. 
Psychologically it is not without analogies to conversion, which 
belongs in youth but which may also occur late in life. In the 
hygiene of old age it will certainly one day have its place. The 
phenomenon is one which may suggest that at a certain stage of 
post-maturity there is a normal physiological as there is a deep- 
seated psychic tendency to pause and complement life, make 
up arrears, wait for belated lines of development to catch up; 
or, in a word, a final round-up of powers and potencies before 
the withering effects of more advanced age set in toward final 
dissolution. 

Dancing manias present another difficult problem to the 
psychogenesist. Why their extreme infectious quality and why 
the loss of all inhibition and the passion to dance to the utter- 
most limits of endurance, till complete exhaustion and some- 
times death supervene ? The exhilaration may become positive 
inebriation. The dancer feels inspired or possessed, attains 
ecstacy, vision, or trance, lets himself go with rapture, perhaps 
mutilates and may even slay himself in mad frenzy. He leaps, 
shrieks, is convulsed and frantic, loses all control, knows no 
restraint, exposes his person, violates every decency in both his 
deeds and his words, becomes outrageous, orgiastic, raving 
and bacchanalian. In all these historical more or less licensed 
excesses we can only see the outcrop of a profound instinct 
to occasionally break away from every constraint and throw 
off all the countless repressions of society, especially on the 
part of those whose lives have long been cabined, cribbed, 
and confined, and give free rein to every impulse. It is a physi- 
ological declaration of independence from every sort of control. 



48 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

as an eruption through superposed geologic strata vents the 
primeval volcanic forces held in check it may be for unnum- 
bered generations. The study of such phenomena gives us an 
unparalleled illustration of the forces that slumber deep in 
human nature and occasionally wreak themselves upon expres- 
sion and play havoc with all the incrustations of convention- 
ality. Thus, in the Platonic sense, a drunk may occasionally 
unlimber human nature, stir up its sediments, or resolve man 
back to his evolutionary, first, animal principles, melting down 
into their elements later acquisitions and perhaps sometimes 
reinforcing older fundamental energies that had become quite 
rudimentary. Perhaps no spectacles within the historic period 
have shown humanity so denuded of all that long periods have 
brought, or exhibited so clearly the elemental powers which 
civilization has done its uttermost to tame and harness. 

Here I would raise the question whether there may not be 
a hitherto undiscovered type of motor-mindedness in which 
dancing is an organ of apperception. As there are people with 
number forms and even letter and word forms, and very unique 
types of synsesthesia, may we not have a class of cases, though 
they be as rare as that which Pierce ^ describes, in which effer- 
ence of the dance order is exceptionally identified with the 
appreciation of words, phrases, poems, as it is in born dancers 
with music ? ^ 

A Glance at its History. — Dancing includes such bodily move- 
ments as are subject to definite rhythmic rule and performed to the 

^ Gustatory Audition, Amer. Jour, of Psy., July, 1907, vol. xviii., pp. 341-352. 

^ Motor-mindedness takes in me, I think, a unique form which I have never found 
anyone who understood, any more than number forms or phonisms and photisms 
are intelligible to those who do not possess them. The earliest illustration of this I 
can now recall was as a boy of about seven when I remembered the names of the 
three Bible characters in the fiery furnace by a very definite rhythmic caper. Sha- 
drach was a step right with the right foot, the same with the left on the first syllable 
which was long; and on drach, the right foot was brought down with a smart spat 
of the toe. Meshach was the same with the left, and A were two steps front, bed 
was a high kick with the left and nego was coming down on two feet successively. 
I remembered these names by these movements which belonged to them and to 
nothing else, and to-day, when these names occur, I think not of the printed forms 
but of these movements. I used to wonder that my parents and other people did 
not understand when I went through the performance and asked them what it 
meant. Many a phrase often not understood and many a nursery jingle, some 
Indian sentences my father knew, and later choice bits of poetry not directly sug- 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 49 

accompaniment of the, voice, instruments, clapping of hands, or 
stamping of feet. JOJ, qld, it was often a solemn ritual full of state 
and ancientry. The character of people may be often learned from 
their dances, and Moliere says that the destiny of nations depends 
upon it. Funeral and death-bed dances are an almost world-wide 

gesting action " spelled " to me different movements, often quite complex. It was, 
I think, later that pantomime and florid gesticulation came in to aid these dances or 
rituals. The simpler ones were sometimes instant and spontaneous, and for others 
I spent often considerable time thinking out and practicing the appropriate ex- 
pressions. Ridicule tended to make me more solitary in these activities and to 
repress them, though it did not check the propensity to think out appropriate 
symphonic movements. Especially of cadenced passages I devised a very crude set 
of symbols that I noted on margins and between the lines, although on looking 
over these old books, I can now interpret but few of them. During adolescence, 
this instinct attached itself more and more to music, and here it is just as strong to- 
day at the age of about sixty as it was at eighteen, although it is more inward. 
While it is strongest for lively dances, no music is complete to me without action, 
and in reverie I am very prone to think out phrase by phrase the gestures, postures, 
etc., that precisely express each and could belong to no other. My ideals are not 
only far beyond my own capacity to execute, but I never saw a professional dancer, 
however ingenious, original, and agile, that fully came up to my notion in most 
respects, though many of them give my own motives. 

The human body is far more complex than the musical scale and is capable 
of expressing not only every phrase and measure, but chord and note; and anything 
in, any music that mimesis, sign language, posture, etc., cannot explain and reinforce, 
is not true music. Moreover, we cannot possibly appreciate or feel the full force 
of a musical motive until we have put it into action. Both music and expressive 
motion are the language of emotion and they began and still belong together. To 
think music is to think motion, to explain it is to set it in motion. Most dances 
merely mark rhythm and so are but the skeleton of the true nature of orchestration. 
This modern dancing is wooden and intellectually lazy. To passively listen to a 
concert is as far from true aesthetic appreciation of music as mere dead articulation 
from eloquence. With the attainment of this, however, I am emboldened to 
describe my peculiarity because I have come to think it not a deformity, but a rudi- 
mentary psychic organ that has accidentally survived in me from an age when 
choral worship and festive song originated. Perhaps my ineptness as a musical 
performer is because my whole body responds to music in too generalized and 
primitive a way to permit specialization and virtuosoship. 

In my musical reveries, I do not need kicky ragtime melodies or even the in- 
toxicating Hungarian dances, .the tarantelle, the saltarello, mazurka, redowa, 
still less the more common ballroom dances, to think out sometimes with great detail 
the pauses and motions from the stillness of sleep and death to the most rapid, 
frantic, and even impossible gyrations, somersaults, flying leaps, hovering in mid- 
air, every limb and finger, eyelids, mouth all in harmonious movement, with ele- 
ments from natural sign languages, oratory, the gestures of every industry, people, 
game, and even animal movements. Were there a motive for all this, I fancy I 
should be a great choral composer, though I fear I should often require the physio- 
logically impossible of my performers. When playing the piano with my hands or 
even with the pianola, I am often troubled with the intricacy of the innovations. 



so EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

custom. The dance is the expression of emotion and depends upon 
the power of the heart to feel, for dance and music are a married 
pair. Perhaps primitive man vauked and skipped rather than 
danced as he screamed and shouted before he sang. Many primitive 
people sing and dance simultaneously. Many of the oldest folk 
songs were dance songs. 

Sometimes my imagination sees men, women, children, sylphs, fairies, fawns, and 
even animals going through illustrative activities, but most of my subjective ac- 
companiments are efferent and I am more faintly doing it all. S everal times I have 
tried to write out under the staff a description of the movements needful to elaborate 
the notes, but it would require perhaps a page for every few measures, and even 
this would be inadequate. Moreover, to attempt such illustrations I cannot readily 
overcome my sense of the invincible silliness it would have for others. This motor 
scene setting differs much with each of the great musicians. Perhaps the most 
breathlessly difi&cult and exasperating in my repertory are Chopin's two krakowiaks 
in which the contrast between the slow heavy bass and the ineffably rapid and 
flitting, and, in passages extremely complicated, right-hand parts is so great, and a 
ponderous elephantine tramp must be synthetized with a spiderlike agility. But 
a close second to these is Wagner's Feuerzauber and the Waldweben and the 
Rain and the Water motive in Senta's ballad and other descriptions of nature. 
These have troubled me for years and I keep changing my interpretations and for- 
getting the last. Compared with these, most of the movements in Beethoven's 
sonatas are easy, though I feel that mine are yet too simple and need greater elabora- 
tion, but with time and effort I could satisfy myself and leave little unexpressed. 
Liszt is simply mad in spots and seems to me in many of his passages and transitions 
the least motor-minded of all. He was not a great composer, but only an ex- 
hibitor of lechnic. Singularly enough, many if not most dances although designed 
for motor accompaniment are often rather hard to give appropriate expression. 
Most good sacred music is easy. The one general principle that can be laid down 
is that high notes tend toward my right and low toward my left, that stress brings 
one forward and pianissimo movements backward, while the former are far more 
emphatic than the latter, and that no movements must be repeated unless the music 
is repeated and that they must be as differentiated as it. 

I wonder if we do not have here a true and new old criterion of music and if, 
as it cadences the soul, it should not also admit of being cadenced in graceful 
activities! How far is it the culminating edification of this supremest of arts to 
suggest all the characteristic movements possible to the human frame and per- 
haps still others once habitual in man's pedigree, but which with his present organ- 
ization he is no longer able to execute, but can only dimly feel? And do not passive 
movements also play a role in this process by which the ancestral neurons are more 
or less awakened? Sometimes in hearing music, we thrill, sob, and even shed 
tears in the most sudden and inexplicable way, or feel elated, soothed, and exalted 
above all care and trouble, experience pangs of woe or ecstasies of joy, are made 
timid and intense, if not positively angry. An art that can thus play upon all the 
gamut and secret springs of emotions can do so upon current theories only by 
causing physiological movements, faint and unconscious or apparent, and may we 
not conclude that music is at its very root and core addressed to motor impulses 
often latent and residual and still capable of being played upon? If so, it is a 
magazine of appeals to restore vestigial processes in the soul and to thus keep us in 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 5^ 

It must be confessed that there is a general tendency downward. 
The skirt dance was at first a praiseworthy effort to substitute grace- 
ful drapery for the penwiper costume and tiptoeing of the ballet 
girl, but it is sinking to the level of ta-ra-ra-ra-boom-de-ay.^ To 
see dancing from pure lightness of heart, we must go to exiled or 
oppressed nations — Poland, Ireland, the Basques, and Jews. Mrs. 
Grove says : " For the last five years I have given my time almost 
entirely to the study of the history of the dance, and the deeper I 
get into it the more I become convinced that the religious dance has 
been the foundation of all the others. There are instances where 
the absolutely secular form of the dance seems to preclude the notion 
of its ever having formed part of a ritual, but I believe this only 
arises from the limitation of our knowledge and from inability to 

touch with our past and to prevent the atrophy of unused functions. This, at least, 
I think it is to me. 

A practical point of no mean consequence is the tempo used or preferred. 
Some dancers have an acquired, and think they have an innate, penchant for f or f 
or other time, and their execution is more strongly sustained by one of these than 
by any others. These varieties ultimately resolve themselves into three, two and 
four, time, the order most frequent in answers to syllabi. Thus groups of three 
seem to be most readily organized into higher unities and to have more carrying 
power. But surely measures of all components should be used and specialization 
here involves, as everywhere, limitations. Rhythm is fundamental to even the sen- 
tence sense and to thought itself. Just as poets adopt certain meters and combina- 
tions of feet, while others that prosodic law sanction are rarely used, so dancing 
strongly tends to eschew many sorts of time which are still found in obsolete dances 
to the tempo of which much music has been written, and some meters once common 
now seem hard and even unnatural. Perhaps every dancer has limits beyond which 
new and harder tempos impair or interfere with facility in forms already acquired. 
All that can be said is that as wide a range as possible within such very diverse 
individual limits should be secured. 

^ I am indebted for these historic paragraphs first to Mrs. Lilly Grove, and 
others. Dancing, Longmans, Green & Co., London, 1901, 454 p. Also to 
G. Desrat, Dictionnaire de la danse, historique, theorique, pratique et bibliographi- 
quedepuis I'origine de la danse jusqu'a nos jours. May et Motteroz, Paris, 1895, 
484 p. Arden Holt, How to Dance the Revived Ancient Dances. Horace Cox, 
London, 1907, 158 p. The Association for the Promotion of Folk Dances, Copen- 
hagen. Old Danish Folk Dances, translated by L. S. Hanson and L. W. Gold- 
smith, 1906, 24 p. Music by Sextus Miskow, 23 p. Caroline Crawford, Folk 
Dances and Games. Barnes, New York, 1908, 82 p. Jakob Bolin, Swedish 
song-plays used at the New York Normal School of Physical Education. Bolin, 
New York, 1908, 21 p. Dr. Karl Storck, Der Tanz. Velhangen & Klasing, 
Bielefeld, 1903, 140 p. Rudolph Voss, Der Tanz und seine Geschichte. Eine 
kulturhistorisch-choreographische Studie. Seehagen, Berlin, 1869, 404 p. Regi- 
nald St. Johnston, A History of Dancing. Simpkin, London, 1906, 197 p. Marie 
Luise Becker, Der Tanz. Seemann, Leipzig, 1901, 210 p. Franz M. Bohme, 
Geschichte des Tanzes in Deutschland. Breitkopf & Hartel, Leipzig, 1886, 2 vols. 
Gaston Vuillier, A History of Dancing. Appleton, New York, 1898, 446 p. 



52 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

trace the dance far back enough. Wherever this is possible, I ar- 
rive at the conclusion that it was once a form of worship, or at 
least a form of magic." The pagan dances were for worship, war, 
and medicine, and the Shakers and Jumpers to obtain the Holy- 
Spirit. Dancing is often a mystery revealed only to the initiated and 
carefully hidden from others. It is probably common to all races, 
and is found among certain animals and birds. Sometimes dancing 
is divided into three kinds — imaginative, or the poetry of motion; 
descriptive, or orgiastic; and the ritual, or worship dance. 

Greek sculptors studied and designed the attitudes of public 
dancers. In the early centuries,' the Christian church allowed* dan- 
cing in its consecrated walls. Orbicular dances of paganism; the 
Orphic and Dionysiac ritual and liturgical dances ; the tragic cho- 
ruses ; the English carols, originally sacred dances ; the Reihen of 
Germany ; the rondes of France and Belgium ; the polka, born in Bo- 
hemia, which so delighted France and England that politics were 
for a time forgotten; the hornpipe of England; the waltz of Ger- 
many; the reel of Scotland; the slow and stately pavane ; the tordion 
and gaillarde, with three lively jumping steps, interspersed with much 
kicking, skipping, and gliding; the courante, a court dance, with 
much pantomime ; the minuet, so called because of its small 
steps ; the gavotte, a peasant dance in costume, often with a dance 
song; the bourree, with song or instrument and strong rhythm, but 
careless and almost yokel form; the farandole, which can be danced 
only by an unmarried man at a christening, birth, or marriage ; the 
chaconne, a Spanish social dance; the contradanse ; the quadrille; 
the carmagnole, which is almost like a cancan ; the polonaise, which 
reflects the spirit of the old aristocracy of Poland; the lively kosaka 
and the redowa and varsoviana; the gypsy dances, that have in- 
spired a new school of music; the strathspey from the Spey valley, 
slower yet harder than the reel; the saraband, with its grace and 
dignity ; the coranto, la volte, trenchmore, brawl, passamezzo, the 
milkmaid and Maypole dances; the morisco; egg, cushion, sword, and 
shawl dances; war and the various weapon dances; the plugge dance, 
a Dutch fandango ; the ballet, which acts and represents almost 
everything in life; the bolero, a very light but short, skipping dance; 
the cachucha, the jota, the saltarello, the tarantella, Sicilian, trescona, 
the nautch dances, the bayadere — most of these suggest the variety 
and ranges of the choreographic art. 

Perhaps the most striking fact about Egyptian dances was that 
they were a necessary part of every religious celebration, and were 
held in honor of the dead. The movements were slow and con- 
torted, and sometimes a friend personified the dead man, imitating 
his qualities, good and bad. The dance women, or awalim, which 
meant wise or learned, attended every feast, for to rejoice meant to 
dance. The Mohammedans leap, whirl, and howl to maddening in- 
toxication, because it is so good to see Allah. A modern Egyptian 
dance, called the bee, is a solo expressing the pain of being stung. 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 53 

Only when a nation becomes artificial, does dancing fall to the level 
of an amusement. Among the ancient Hebrews, it was chiefly an act 
of gratitude for victory or an accompaniment to a hymn of praise. 
The motive was solemn, perhaps to express deliverance. Only in 
degenerate days did it become promiscuous or obnoxious. Choral 
night dances with torches are common and very impressive among 
the Eastern Jews. Salome's dance before Herod, the topic of so 
many artists, indicated decline. A Jewish proverb is that he who 
does not rejoice at a dance does not know what joy is. Delitzsch 
says that the taste for dancing grew in the later Hebrew period, 
when the Lord must be praised with timbrel and dance, as also at 
the feast of atonement. In Poland the joy at the expected deliverer, 
that shall make them a nation again, breaks out in song and dance 
in the synagogue. 

In Greece, where the soul was defined as the harmony of the 
body, dancing was a method of developing a fair soul in a fair body, 
and here poetry, music, and dancing were shown to form one art. 
Nothing, says Lucian, requires so great activity of body and mind. 
The root idea must penetrate the whole man or woman. Steps 
woven in rhythm and verse go together, and dancers were called 
cheirosophi, or skilled with the hands. Like the modern Italians, 
they had a mimetic, pantomime language, or art of speaking afar by 
gesture. Dancing with the feet came first, and hands and arms later. 
The Greeks were not, like the Orientals, too lazy, or, like the Ro- 
mans, too dignified to dance. Poets were the first inventors and 
teachers of dancing, and this art kept its original purity as a high 
standard of morals prevailed. Homer says that sleep, love, music, 
and blameless dancing are the sweetest and most perfect of all 
human joys. To be a good soldier, one must dance, it was said. 
Primarily in Greece it was a form of worship and a branch of edu- 
cation. Each type of movement had its own dance ; the kubistic, with 
plenty of leaping and acrobatic feats ; the spheristic, with rhythmic 
movements and ball rolling; and the orchestral, or dancing proper, as 
now understood. Funerals had grave marches and gestures picturing 
sorrow and the cause of death. Youth performed a warlike dance 
called gymnopeedia. The Pyrrhic war dances were the fiercest and 
had four divisions; podism, or all kinds of running; xiphism, or 
sham fighting; the kosmos, with high leaping, as if over walls and 
ditches; and the tetracomos, a square figure with slow, majestic 
measure. Scaliger pretended to reproduce the Pyrrhic dance in cos- 
tume before Maximilian I, as did Professor Meibom, with an an- 
cient Greek air, before Queen Christina of Sweden. Lycurgus in- 
vented the hormos, a graceful, lively war dance for youths and 
maidens, with much competitive exercise in the figure. The crane 
dance imitated the intricacies of the Cretan labyrinth. Various 
deities had their own dances. 

At the great Delian festival every five years, Artemis was first 
worshiped and then Apollo, Delian maidens, with flowers and fes- 



54 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tal robes, " danced to joyful choruses around the altars of the two 
deities, and set forth in sacred ballets the story of the birth of 
Apollo and Artemis, with the adventures of their mother, Latona. 
Choruses and hymns followed, regulating the desires." " After sacri- 
fices came a dance in which women imitated the movement of the 
island, when it was supposed to be tossed by the sea. Then came the 
winding labyrinthine dances, where the Chorentai were guided in 
the evolutions of the maze by a design on the floor of the orchestra. 
While all Greek dancing was founded upon a religious idea, that of 
the Delian feast was especially sacred," with the same reverent 
character as that of the Hebrews. The chorus surrounded the altar 
while the sacrifice was burning and sang airs which simulated the 
dances, which were often imitative. One depicted the supposed 
amusements of Apollo's youth; another, scenes from the life of 
Ajax. Sometimes these festive dances and processions became gross 
and licentious, as in Elis and the Dorian dances in honor of Artemis 
Cordax, and those in Perga, which were almost orgies. In almost 
every religious function of the Greeks, dancing was a part of the 
ceremony, and thus the deeds of gods were solemnized about altars 
and statues, while the chorus in the strophe of the hymn turned 
from east to west; in the antistrophe from west to east; and in the 
epode, or end of the song, to the front of the altar. Plato says: 
" There are two really beautiful dances, the martial Pyrrhic and the 
tragic Emmeleia," named from a follower of Dionysos, and this 
all philosophers praised. The Dionysiac or Bacchic festivals were 
entirely composed of the three dramatic dances — the Emmeleia, Kor- 
dax, and the Sikinnis — tragic, comic, and satyric. The movements 
of the chorus, made up often of old men and matrons, were slow, 
with minuet step. The liveliest dances were those of the tragic 
chorus, when a joyful surprise or a new hope was expressed. The 
choragus, or coryphseus, sang a solo, while the chorus executed 
rhythmic movements. Thus the maiden chorus in the " Seven 
against Thebes " danced a fervid song in the hope that the protect- 
ing gods would give aid. Euripides composed a solo dance for Jo- 
casta's joy on seeing her son again, and in the Orestes dances, Elec- 
tra dances in mad pain when all hope is lost. In the Eumenides 
there were fifty furies in the chorus, and their wild rush into the 
orchestra, with terrifying gestures and masks, so frightened the 
women and children that their number was limited by law in those 
colonies where women were admitted to the theater. In the Antig- 
one the chorus plans to dance all night before the temples. These 
dancers required the greatest versatility of mind and sympathy with 
nature to produce the marvelous effects upon the audiences with 
which they are credited. 

With all its splendid accompaniment of song, music, dress, and 
scenery; with, in its best age, decorum and high moral tendency, we 
cannot wonder that Timocrates exclaimed, upon first seeing a theat- 
rical dance, " What exquisite enjoyment is this which I have so 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 55 

long sacrificed to the false pride of philosophy ! " In the dramatic 
dance, with its standard of beauty and proportion, are found the 
germs of the pantomime and of the more modern ballet. The lyric 
drama of the days of yEschylus arose out of the dithyrambic hymns 
sung at sacred festivals, at first extemporized under the effect of the 
grape, and then toned down to a trained chorus. Its simplest form 
was a circular dance by a band of choristers around the statue or 
altar of a god, and out of this Attic tragedy bloomed into its luxu- 
riance of verbal melody. Again, there were flower dances and 
others in imitation of various animals, representing the flapping of 
wings with garments wound about arms and hands; a bear dance to 
Artemis by young girls in saffron; an owl dance, shading the eyes 
and turning the head to and fro. The Hyporchema was one of the 
most ancient and belonged first to the cult of Apollo. The most 
beautiful Spartan dance, the Caryatis, was performed annually by 
the richest girls in Sparta with flat baskets on their heads, contain- 
ing the sacred cake, chaplet, incense, and knife to slay the victim. 
These women probably formed the model of the Caryatides in archi- 
tecture. In Crete perhaps some of these dances are yet preserved. 
The priests of Cybele had a martial dance, beating their shields to 
drown the cries of the ancient Zeus, that his father, Kronos, might 
not eat him. The Arnaut and Wallachian dances are perhaps the 
same. The Ionian was a duet, danced quietly and lightly after a 
banquet. In May the dancers are covered with flowers in honor of 
Flora, and their song is a welcome to her. Thus ancient Greece 
danced to develop health, courage for battle, and a devotional spirit.^ 
In ancient times the dignified Romans danced but little. The 
priests, called Salii, danced to the honor of Mars in their ritual, and 
from this sprang nearly all the Roman dances. Three hundred and 
ninety years after its foundation, to divert the people and propitiate 
the plague, the Ludion dance was invented. In May Roman youths 
and maids danced in the fields, gathered boughs, and adorned houses. 
The funeral dances of Athens were introduced, and the chief per- 

^ M. A. Hincks (The Dance and the Plastic Arts in Ancient Greece. Nineteenth 
Century and After. 1907. Vol. 61, pp. 477-489) says sculpture, vase painting, and 
every aspect of Greek life was influenced by dancing, which was perhaps the most 
potent formative power of ancient art. They really held that the beautiful is 
greater than the good because it includes it. Probably the dance did originate 
with Eros and remained long associated with him, its pantomime and rhythmic and 
harmonious activities being promoted by the love of God. In a sense we have to 
worship the Greek gods to believe in their myths or to understand their art, for the 
dances died with the deities. The dance "best expresses the religious feeling and 
enthusiasm of the Greeks." "It was the constant glorification and veneration 
of the human body"; it was expressive gesture with music and poetry highly elucida- 
tive. If every new movement destroyed the harmony in the dance, the next created 
another more beautiful. We have to go deep with Pythagoras into the principle 
of rhythm, harmony, and number to understand it all. 



56 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

former, the archmime, personified the dead, or, more often, por- 
trayed his chief acts with absohtte justice, wearing a mask hke the 
face of the dead one. Although dull and severe dancing was almost 
as old as Rome itself, it was fully developed and introduced into the 
theater only in the days of Augustus, where pantomime reached an 
incredible degree of perfection and there were three thousand for- 
, eign women dancers in Rome, who were retained when the expense 
of foreign teachers of philosophy and of other scholars was cut 
down. The feet were eloquent; a language of the hands was mov- 
ing; and gesture speech was even richer than in South Italy now, 
and as useful in communicating with aliens as an interpreter. Whole 
plays were performed by gestures and steps alone. Every well-bred 
man and woman practiced dancing, until Seneca called the fashion 
a disease; but the dignity of movement and carriage of both sexes, 
and even the eloquence of orators, was aided by it, and the Romans 
were more sensitive than any had ever been before to the charms 
of a noble gait. Cicero was vexed because it was said that Ros- 
cius's gestures were as eloquent as his own words. In later times 
dancing grew licentious, and Cato thought it horrible to twist the 
body thus. 

It is hard for us to recognize that the twinkling-footed celerity 
of dancing was originally a religious service. St. Basil recom- 
mended the faithful to practice dancing as much as possible on earth, 
because that would be their chief occupation as angels in heaven. 
In the apocryphal romance, entitled the Acts of John, that Apostle 
is made to say that after the Last Supper our Lord called upon his 
disciples to join hands and dance around him while a hymn was 
sung. Gregory declares that Paul thought the dance useful in re- 
ligious services. The early Christians had to keep their services 
silent in catacombs and private halls, and this increased dancing. 
The first bishops, called Praesuls, led the sacred dance around the 
altar in the raised choir on feast days and Sundays. Each feast day 
had its appropriate hymn and dance, and there were dances before 
the tombs of the martyrs. Church dances were never mixed, but 
each sex had its own chorus. Church and graveyard dancing was 
forbidden by the Council of 692, but in the thirteenth century was 
introduced again into the sanctuary with miracle plays representing 
Bible scenes. These were forbidden by the Bishop of Cologne in 
1617, but church dancing seems to have been unforbidden for five 
or six centuries, and the prohibition of it did not affect dignified 
and graceful movements, and at the end of each psalm, instead of 
the Gloria Patri, the saint was invoked to pray for the worshipers 
and they promised to dance for him. In the day of the Nuremberg 
Chronicle, in 1493, dancing became a passion among all classes, al- 
though the dancing mania did not become endemic till 1374, when 
there were an enormous number affected by St. Vitus's dance. In 
honor of the English saint, Willibrod (690), dancing processions 
were instituted, and in 1892 fourteen thousand people made pil- 



\ 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 57 

grimages to his shrine at Echternach. Up to the seventeenth cen- 
tury dancing was often obhgatory as a feudal hansel, or a required 
act of servitude or tribute of gratitude. The pilgrim march, which 
was forward two steps and back one ; the Jumping Saints, who main- 
tained this step even up the high steps of the church and before the 
altar, are inspired by the devotional spirit. At Seville dances are 
performed before the Holy Sacrament and on two feast days. This 
dance belongs to the Musarabic rite, and its beautiful music cannot 
be printed. It is often with castanets; the clergy kneel, and the con- 
gregation are greatly impressed. 

The same feeling that moves a Spaniard to dance a jota before a 
corpse, if it be that of a young person saved, perhaps, from a life 
of trouble and sin, prompts the women of Northern India to sing 
and dance joyfully on the death of a man of great age: Dances at 
Irish wakes; the Flanders custom of taking the winding sheet and 
moving it in rhythmic fashion to song, which is very old; the dances 
of the Abyssinian Church, supposed to be Davidic; the whirling of 
the dervishes to parody the movement of the heavenly bodies ; the 
wild revels on Walpurgis Night, where imps whirl to uncanny music 
played on catgut stretched over horses' skulls in honor of a saintly 
English nun; the fire dance on the Eve of St. John; the pure light- 
heartedness of the old English dances in the day of Sir Roger de 
Coverly, until Puritanism called the way to heaven too narrow for 
men to dance in — all this illustrates the most plastic uses of the 
dance and how it can express every human sentiment, and is at 
once a language of the muscles, will, and heart. 

Very interesting is O'Neill's ^ discussion of dancing, which he 
thinks was originally circular worship and abounding in wheel sym- 
bols. Dancing, according to Schopenhauer, is the apex of physio- 
logical irritability, and makes animals most vividly conscious of 
their existence and most exultant in exhibiting it. In the most an- 
cient times China had ritualized it in the spring, in which consisted 
a large part of the education of boys from thirteen on. It has long 
been a religious function in Japan, where dancers are almost a caste. 
The old Roman Salii were a priestly college. The worship of Mars 
had its dancing cult. So did the whirling dervishes. The dance of 
the stars was an old and well elaborated classic idea. . 

Savage dances express their character, and some races have 
special dances for every day of the year and almost every occasion, 
and could hardl}' live a week without dances. This is seen, too, in 
all nations in their infancy. Primitive people often dance for their 
own amusement and pronounce it " hard but nice." Most dances, 
thought to be secular among savages, were at first religious or 
magical. The buffalo, snake, bear, kangaroo, eagle, elk, and other 
animal and perhaps totemic dances may be to imitate prey, insure 

' O'Neill, John, Night of the Gods. Quaritch and Nutt, London, 1893-97, 2 
vols., vol. ii, chapter iii. 



58 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

abundant game, or they are forms of rejoicing over a successful 
hunt. Perhaps they express regret at the slaughter of their victim, 
so that it is sometimes a purification ceremony. Some war dances 
are essentially schools of tactics, and in their frantic exaltation the 
fictitious character of the exercise is sometimes forgotten and friends 
are killed. Men often dance till they fall exhausted. Sometimes 
they dance to propitiate the ghosts of slain enemies; paint them- 
selves black and sing dirges addressed to the souls they have disem- 
bodied ; so that love, hunt, war, and exorcism are all expressed, 
while foaming at the mouth provokes inspiration and prophecy. 
Some have not only death dances but resurrection dances, where 
they hide or fall rigid for a time and then leap up in joy. Many 
dances are for the healing of diseases by medicine men, and some- 
times the ailment is parodied, as in the Tarantella and Tigritiya. 
The hideous noise and bustle about the bed of a man about to die 
are to keep him from sleeping, which is akin to temporary death. 
Besides incantations, dances reveal mysteries which cannot be told, 
but only danced out. Devil dancers, with their bull roarers, frighten 
off evil spirits, and in ancient times were perhaps connected with 
human sacrifices and cannibalism. The Lamas in their devil dances 
represent wrestling matches between saints and demons. The Mo- 
quis paint their ribs with white pipe clay to look like skeletons. In 
Brazil the bones are dug up at midnight and dances are performed 
about them. Dancing masks and costumes are elaborate and ex- 
actly prescribed and often very gorgeous. Sometimes their ritual 
is so exact and solemn that he who makes a mistake is killed on the 
spot. Friendly contests in dancing are very common, and in Aus- 
tralia perhaps the most elaborate of all are the initiation dances at 
adolescence. The solstices are often thus celebrated and tribal 
enmities perhaps suspended. In a Zuni sun dance four thousand 
men and women took part, and mutilations and sufferings were some- 
times horrible. In some, the men are wonderfully gotten up to 
stimulate sexual selection by the women. In Dahomey the king per- 
forms a pas seul in honor of a distinguished guest. The Corrobboree 
is essentially a very elaborate dance, part of which is usually by 
moonlight. 

Few understand what pedagogical gems the best folk- 
dances are or with what condensed meanings they are freighted. 
They are not merely wholesome exercises or amusements, but 
moral, social, and aesthetic forces, condensed expressions of 
ancestral and racial traits. Like many of the figures in design 
which characterize the art of the ethnic varieties of mankind, 
they are often concentrated, acted narratives of epoch-making 
events which persist after all specific memory of their meaning 
has been forgotten. They are story-roots ages old that connect 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 59 

modern nian with the times, facts, and heroes that made his 
nation and shaped his character. They once went with song, 
and though the latter is often lost, its spirit and significance 
survive. Thus they may be residual, quintessential history 
told in an adumbrated form in action. Many, again, depict 
national traits. The Scotch reel, e. g., says Gulick, represents 
the canniness of the Scot. It is gymnastically economic, with 
carefully regulated joy and definite consideration in advance 
of each step. Russian dances are marked by great flexion and 
extension of the whole body as if crouching to share the vitality 
of the earth and then springing erect as high into the air as 
possible with the head thrown back as if throwing off all re- 
pression in an upward aspiration and involving lavish ex- 
penditure of energy. The Hungarian czardas advanced from 
slow to very rapid and passionately intense movements, a 
process representing the diathesis of this race. Italian dances 
abound in vivacity, lightness, grace, etc.^ 

The origin of these dances can no more be traced than can 
that of folk music or myth, but they grew up very slowly 
through centuries and perhaps millennia, until they have come 
to fit and express the very soul of the people, embodying its 
memories, expressing its psychophysic traits, aspirations, etc. 
Thus folk dances are marvelous embodiments of the ethical, 
reHgious, and in general the temperament of peoples. It is 
such action rituals that shape as well as utter the very psychic 
types of the people who developed and were developed by them. 
If thinking is evolved out of actions needful for survival, it is 
such activities as these that contribute to the very temper and 
tempo of thought and thus do very much for sane and effective 
thinking by laying down its neural bases. Hence they give tG 
the individual wholesome feelings and ideas, and weld him to 
his race, place him in the proper setting to it, endow him, with 
his heritage, and thus integrate him with it. 

In the desire to revive some of the many decaying pastimes 
of Merry Old England (as described in Brand's " Antiqui- 
ties ") two countrymen were found, a few years ago, who knew 
the Morris dances and songs by direct tradition from old days. 



' See Dr. L. H. Gulick, Folk and National Dances. Proceedings of the Second 
Annual Playground Congress, 1908. 



6o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

They were with difificulty persuaded to come to London and 
taught both the songs and steps to a group of comely work- 
ing girls. The latter proved apt pupils and taught them to 
still wider circles. Soon popular attention was attracted and 
not only among the poor but in rich aristocratic circles these 
girls were in great demand as both performers and teachers, 
until their time was all employed thus, and in fashionable 
parlors and lawns Morris dances became a very popular diver- 
sion ; and this movement may yet take its place beside the arts 
and crafts revivals of the old industries of the guilds as another 
instance of psychogenetic recrudescence in the folk soul. Un- 
til we know more of its laws we cannot explain resurgences 
like these. 

It is such precious treasures of which this unhistoric coun- 
try, a pudding stone of many nationalities, has been atro- 
ciously unmindful until lately, despite the fact that the 
majority of the population in most of our large cities is of 
foreign parentage or children of parents born abroad. Most 
who come to our shores soon leave behind them all such rich 
possessions, hence the recent attempt to revive festivals, pa- 
geants and dances has brought with it as one of its astonish- 
ing results, to those ignorant of the significance of these forms, 
a genuine revival of racial spirit and self-respect. The signifi- 
cance of this movement we are, indeed, hardly able as yet to 
estimate, for its possibilities are still undeveloped. The mem- 
bers of these various racial communities in our midst have by 
this means come to feel their own solidarity, to revere their 
own past, to feel that they have something of worth to con- 
tribute to us, and so while their loyalty to their father- or 
mother-land has been increased as they have reestablished 
connections with its traditions, not only has greater continuity 
come into their own lives which has made them of more value, 
but their allegiance to the country of their adoption has been 
increased. Our national life, which was so poor in festive 
spirits and forms, has thereby been enriched. These revivals of 
folk customs, due to the production of folk dances here, have 
thus knit the ties that bind' race to race and given newcomers 
more courage to maintain and enforce in their offspring other 
good customs and moral sanctions which they brought here but 
which were being abandoned to the detriment of both parents 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 6i 

and children. It has done much to make us feel that we must 
devise more rational methods of celebrating our own national 
holidays, which till lately have been allowed to degenerate 
often to rowdyism and to pleasures both dangerous and vicious 
and which it is high time should be utilized for pedagogic and 
patriotic purposes. 

The dancing here advocated has little to do with the ball- 
room and finds little more to praise and little less to condemn 
in it than do Puritan religionists, though on different grounds. 
The offenses of these dances have usually been against hygiene, 
involving as they did unreasonable hours, fatigue, excitement, 
exposure, and often, too, against morality. The types of move- 
ment are chiefly confined to the limbs, respiration is restricted 
and especially facial movements and expressions are so tabooed 
that the physiognomy often seems sad and wooden, while the 
steps are conventionalized so that their athletic value is limited ; 
they usually engage chiefly the young and unmarried, so that 
their attraction is too predominantly intersexual, however re- 
fined and safeguarded they are by prim proprieties. These 
dances are thus attenuated with hardly any suggestions of the 
possibilities that have been and now seem again likely to be 
realized. 

One origin of dancing is work. Many ancient indus- 
tries which involved striking, pulling, lifting, were con- 
certed and oscillatory like the " ye-ho " of the sailors when 
raising an anchor or tightening a sail, and were attended by 
crude songs fJr tempo, whence arose the old work canticles, 
of which many have been recently rescued from oblivion by 
scholars, and they constitute a valuable missing link in the 
evolution of woven steps and poses. In this element the dance 
harks back to occupations of primitive people. In this field 
pedagogic genius is now achieving one of its brilliant triumphs 
in devising imitative action songs that initiate young children 
into many a human avocation by gesture and song. They sow 
seed, plant, tend and reap the harvest crops, bind, thresh, and 
grind corn, weave, braid, hammer, chop, mow, milk, churn, sew, 
wash and iron, march and fight, build and cobble, row and sail, 
hunt and fish, dig and lift, throw, shoot, paint, hew and plane, 
act weddings, play games, ride horses, keep school, tend babies, 
and sometimes act out church services, funerals, etc. These mo- 



62 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tor mimeses not only give a vast variety of exercises for face 
and voice, and circulation of the muscles, but what is far bet- 
ter, they implant early a deep, all-sided sympathy for labor and 
the high arts of human life which makes the best possible 
basis for an education which is truly liberal if, as we are now 
learning, industry is the law of culture. Thus the child par- 
ticipates in the activities of the early savage stages of life. 

Again, many represent nature life in pantomime. Children 
learn to fly like birds, swim like fish, strut like the peacock, 
buzz like the bee, croak and hop like the frog, climb like the 
bear, and act the part and make the noises of scores of creatures 
known and unknown, wild and domestic.^ Thus the child 
often gets high pleasure and participates in the life of plants, 
flowers, and trees, and feels more keenly the power of the rocks, 
mountains, sea, sun, moon, storm, morning, evening, and thus 
restores in and for itself in its nascent hours, the now too often 
lost appreciation of nature, every item of which has sometime 
and somewhere been an object of worship, and lay deep and 
betimes a basis of the love of the world, of man, and of God. 
The importance of cadenced movements as organs, first of 
interest, and later of knowledge which psychogenetic students 
are now revealing is very great. Here again the child is be- 
coming a key to unlock the secrets of the stages in the devel- 
opment of the race, and vice versa, racial history sheds light 
upon individual development. 

Another source of dancing is pure play. The capering and 
prancing exuberance of animal spirits, the fund of superfluous 
vitality, is the purest joy in the world, far beyond that which 
sense, wealth, and fame can give. This source of dancing is 
most unformed. Even trifling delights make children and 
primitives leap and shout as if drunk with joy; so, too, pain 
and grief have their motor utterances, if yet more crude and 
unritualized. There are dances of pity, anger, fear, jealousy, 
and most of all of love, so that every cardinal emotion is thus 
shown forth and may thus be strengthened and purified or 
degraded and repressed by this complex quality. 

As we have seen, the history of dancing shows that for 
most races, and in most ages, the religious motive predomi- 

* See chap, i, p. 25. 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 63 

nates. For about every known savage tribe their religion, 
which generally forms a far larger part of their life than does 
ours, has dances as its chief forms of service. To them these 
are holy passion plays as sacred as the communion service to 
Christians. The dreaded " ghost dance " of our Indians is 
pathetic devotion to the souls of all the great dead of the tribe 
with which they commune. There are dances to the buffalo, 
snake, eagle, sun, moon, crocodile, trees, corn, rice, and other 
crops ; dances for rain and everything essential to the life of the 
tribe even with the elements of prayer and totemism strangely 
and inexplicably mixed. There are dances for men, women, 
children, and slaves; for the celebration of birth, marriage, 
death; to commemorate anniversaries, war, disease, pestilence, 
drouth and famine, in all of which the souls of the cory- 
bantes commune with gods, the souls of ancestors, or spirits 
that bless or curse. To learn a new religion they must 
learn its dances and its processionals, rituals, forms, and pos- 
tures. Savage devotees often dance themselves into a frenzy 
and when they fall are thought to be in ecstatic com- 
munion with the Divine, like the rapt Sybil. Thus the soul 
rises to communion with both the dead and the gods in vision 
and is thought to be converted or to attain immortality. Many 
of these dances are thought to illustrate " the other world " 
conduct. Heaven, says an Eastern poet, is " one long mystic 
dance, with the stars sweeping ever on with cadenced action to 
the music of the orbs of light." 

Perhaps next to the dances of religion come those of love, 
in its loftiest and also in its grossest and most animal forms. 
Between its extremes, dances of phallic mysteries, and the love 
that scorns death and is fixed on the good, beautiful and the 
true, what a range! If love dances degrade, they can also 
exhalt and purify as well as long-circuit passion and vicariate 
for its bestialism as few other things can do. The cake-walk 
is perhaps the closest human analogy to the showing off or' 
balzing and other forms of animal courtship that are so potent 
in sexual selection. By pantomimic dances also the stages and 
forms of falling in love, of coyness, unconscious inclination, 
progressive fascination and final conquest, can be set forth in 
symbolic and typical gestures more expressive and truer to life 
than the words of romance or poetry can ever be. Here, too. 



64 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

etiquette and convention are almost as important as they are 
in worship. For no other class of dance are both sexes neces- 
sary, for under this form most social dances fall although they 
constitute altogether a very small portion of and are on the 
whole far from showing ideal situations and relations between 
swains and maidens. These can be made both alteratives and 
vents rather than stimulators of passion. 

Then come war dances, from those of savages to the 
Pyrrhic and Martian, of which marching and military evolu- 
tions have preserved something of the old spirit, as we see in 
the way in which the fife and drum bring a flush of heroism and 
courage even to dastard hearts. In these ways we find these 
four — industry, religion, love, and war, playing upon our 
muscles in idealized situations and preforming the soul by 
determining how it will act when these passions are at their 
acme. 

Another great role of dancing is, as we have seen, acting 
out history, and mythology, setting forth the records of the 
past with maximal insistence at every point on the motor ele- 
ments with the best elocutionary and dramatic accompaniments. 
Thus we not only fix in memory but vitalize by bringing home 
to the heart and life great personages and events, so that we 
have here a new way of teaching history. Festivities and cele- 
brations rehearse events in condensed and symbolic form until 
they stand out as real and are etched into the soul not only of 
the actors, but of the spectators. Thus early archives are 
written not in letters but in the language of these motion 
pictures ; not laid away to mold but kept fresh and transmitted 
by periodic rehearsal ; and thus not only the dead but mythical 
personages and imaginary events work their culture effects. 
In these ways muscles vitalize the past for the young and here 
despite much crudity and error we are probably beginning a 
new and interesting line of festal presentations destined to 
place a very important but lost instrument in the hands of the 
pedagogue. 

In this broad humanistic sense dancing had become almost 
a lost art. Its traces, of course, inevitably tend to vanish un- 
less it is assiduously practiced because, despite the ancient and 
still more modern attempts at graphic record, we have still no 
effective mode of preserving these save oral tradition. The 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 65 

exact form of every ancient dance is lost and our knowledge of 
them is largely put together from incidental descriptions and 
from art representations of postures and poses. The great 
Mysteries were chiefly celebrated by their aid in all the coun- 
tries about the Mediterranean which were commemorated cen- 
turies before Christ and in the gradual reinterpretation of 
which we are coming to realize that regeneration and Euchar- 
istic beliefs and practices instituted by Christianity were sacred 
and inviolable secrets which no celebrant might reveal. No 
other art, therefore, is so fugitive, so difficult to represent by 
any method of notation, and hence its most significant and 
widespreading forms have sunk to oblivion, but the instinct 
remains in every thoroughly vitalized soul. 

Among the signs of revival are a new sense of the charm 
and infection of dancing. A large proportion of average 
modern men are not physically overworked, for machines, 
sitting, and indoor life have relieved them of drudgery and 
hence doubtless increased the tendency to physical spontaneity. 
Among our data are the confessions of many mature people 
who feel impelled to expose themselves to the provocative of 
" kicky " music, some of whom pull down the curtains at 
home and dance in a way that would doubtless make a master 
of the art groan, to all sorts of music, from classic and sacred 
to the latest popular song or twostep. The pianola has con- 
tributed somewhat to this revival and many have found it a 
wholesome and refreshing exercise, rivaling golf, bicycling, 
boating, or at least a pleasant variant from these. This kind 
of dancing is from its very nature Ic pas seiil and every step 
is an individual creation made on the spot. 

Again, gymnastics are becoming aesthetic, and mere acro- 
batics and physical culture for their own sake, if not drifting 
danceward, are used as setting-up exercises and as correlative. 
In colleges, normal schools, etc., this higher dancing is now 
taught, often under a number of euphonistic names, as cal- 
isthenics, etc., and on the wall of one room I have seen a motto, 
" Motion for emotion." Younger high school girls have de- 
cidedly greater aptitude, need, and liking for this than boys. 

I lately saw some' scores of country female teachers at a sum- 
mer school, clad in proper loose dress with short skirts, beginning 
these exercises; and a stiffer, more conscious group could hardly 
6 



66 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

be found. To move the limbs sideways, front, and back, lift the feet 
three inches from the floor, seemed so hard for body and mind as 
to be almost cruel. At the end of six weeks I saw them again, and 
while by no means accomplished in the art, the gain in form, grace, 
and harmony of movement was amazing. Limbs, trunk, arms, neck, 
now moved as if not on rusty hinges but on newly oiled joints, and 
nearly all followed the course to the end, sometimes at the expense 
of other courses. Interest grew and the faces had lost the rather 
stolid, sodden look, and many of them actually beamed as the hour 
progressed with the joy of life, and some showed a most whole- 
some abandon to it. At any rate, this class hour was the happiest 
of all to those not too euphorious lives. So in many a Y. M. C. A. 
gymnasium, in very many parks and playgrounds, roof and pier gar- 
dens, sand yards, and not a few church basements, dancing under 
various names is taught, and everywhere with great interest and ex- 
cellent results. A clerical trustee of a church girls' school, having 
heard the pupils were taught to dance, preached vehemently against 
it, but later, seeing the same system in operation elsewhere and told 
it was rhythmic physical culture, he became first interested, then en- 
thusiastic, and finally took private lessons himself. 

In one girls' college I lately saw an afternoon festival with a 
charming background of hill, water, and wood, in which a hundred 
seniors rehearsed with costumes, poses, and mystical music how Pan 
got a soul from Syrinx ; and the oreads, or mountain nymphs, first 
appeared in gray ; hamadryads, spirits of the oaks, in delicate green, 
sought their trees, the naiads of the water, in iridescent drapery, 
played with the fountain. Pan and his troop of Fauns, in dull red, 
danced very eloquently. Syrinx's nymphs, in white, were joyous 
with flower garlands. These evolutions and the artistic scene of the 
action of the story gave a set of sensations which I fancy quite 
new to the modern world since ancient Greece. It was music in 
motion, with endless suggestions, but, like everything of this sort, 
utterly indescribable save to one who has seen it. The culture ef- 
fect, too, of imparting interest for all that is suggested by the preg- 
nant word Greek, although it cannot yet be fathomed by psychology, 
is a valuable and assured thing. In this institution the course of in- 
struction is calendared " natural dancing," as it should be. 

Thus we already see that dancing covers a very wide field. 
Perhaps it begins with the earliest sense of rhythm which some 
observers of infancy find when, delicately patting the mouth 
of a cooing baby, they find its attention singularly arrested and 
charmed. It at any rate expands all the way from periodic 
scansion, intonations, college yells, vestments, up to the sen- 
tence sense, which cadences and sets pace to thought and gives 
to it a bod)^ and control, preforming style, manners, enriching 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 67 

emotional life, putting in touch with the past, as one of the 
best organs of recapitulation of the life of the race by the in- 
dividual, limbering overworked sinews and muscles, and giv- 
ing nerve to flabby city children, whether pampered or neg- 
lected. Thus home, church, school, are winning back what 
they had been too ready to give over to the devil. 

All psychic changes are expressed in motion, and among 
all movements of the human body there came at a certain stage 
of evolution one group of movements, viz., those of lungs, 
throat, and larynx, which perhaps quite unexpectedly produced 
noises. These movements were originally no more addressed 
to the ear than any other form of activity. Thus out of autom- 
atisms and reflexes language slowly evolved as man became 
more and more social and as need of concurrent activity and 
of pooling on perceptions of one for the benefit of the com- 
munity increased. The intricate expressive movements which 
were its matrix, after having accompanied it with great pro- 
fusion of movements during its early stages, tended to decline 
as it became effective because they were no longer necessary 
and involved waste and energy. Man to-day has little con- 
ception of what gesture means and can do. Every single move- 
ment and pose of the body has meaning. We have alluring 
glimpses of this original language common to all men in 
pantomime and in the more conventional forms of it in the 
various sign languages that have been developed.^ Changes of 
pitch and tempo are in a sense a dancing accompaniment to 
words and the thoughts they express. This only needs 
more elaborate gesticulation to become eloquence and choric 
orchestration in the broad Greek sense, for this was the origin 
of both song and drama. Perhaps music was first to sweeten 
words; and dancing was a motor, and song an auditory, ac- 
companiment of speech. Thus, if thought is repressed action, 
dancing is thought expressed by the movement in which it 
originated ; and so, again, a part of its pleasure is reversionary. 
But in English, and especially in this country, our speech has 
dropped everything not necessary for conveying meaning. It 
is only the savage who talks with his whole body, or the Ital- 

' See Wundt, W. M., Volkerpsychologie. Bd. I. Engelmann, Leipzig, 1900. 
See also W. P. Clark, Indian sign language. Hamersly, Philadelphia, 1884, 
443 P- 



68 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ian laborer, who cannot do manual work and talk at the same 
time because gestures are so essential and habitual. The Eng- 
lish language is thus more remote than any other from this 
primitive condition. Indeed, our very printers' fonts contain 
more e's than any other vowel, and this is the thinnest and 
farthest front in the mouth, requiring the least effort, while 
the consonants, especially labials and dentals, make up the 
great body of our speech. This involves gain, but also loss, 
both vocal and muscular, and probably tends to mental des- 
iccation and decay. Now it is this tendency against which one 
of the best influences of dancing in the old sense of the word 
is directed, and which it tends in no small degree to overcome. 
Why should our thin superficial speech, which is made still 
more unnatural by writing and reading where the auditory 
element is eliminated, be improved? Here we stand before a 
great question, the answer to which in very concise terms runs 
along the following lines. Speech that is now slowly approxi- 
mating a mere whisper, is not so genuine and hearty an ex- 
pression of psychic activity as a language that involves all the 
motor possibilities and combinations of the body. Our atten- 
uated utterances play over the surface of the soul, as it were; 
are less deep and honest, although perhaps more subtle. Even 
lying is easier when it involves a slight articulatory element 
than when it involved widespread and forcible innovation 
made up of both automatic and voluntary elements. Again, 
such speech is further removed from action and even conduct 
than primitive language could possibly be, and hence more 
readily lends itself to casuistry, evasion, and perversion of 
truth. It is such language that is most often used to conceal 
reality, and it certainly does not favor the type of character 
that is straightforward, simple, forcible, and decided. Mere 
talkiness is a more easily manageable vehicle of prevarication 
even than mere acting, although it is indefinitely harder to act 
out a lie than to speak one. Language, therefore, in its mod- 
ern types, tends to produce a degenerated psychosis of gossip ; 
chatter and most talk does not vent or reveal the depths of 
the soul, but only ephemeral shadows that flit over its surface. 
It is this evil, which has many far-reaching consequences for 
the health and robustness of the soul quite as much as of the 
body, that the ideal dancing teacher seeks to correct. The 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 69 

ideal purpose of instruction in tliis domain is to strengthen 
utterance, to make it more hearty and deep by restoring the 
motor elements that have degenerated, and to enable man 
once more to talk with his whole organism, and thereby to 
bring about a new and wholesome unity o£ action between the 
soul and the body. That this would make for moral efficiency, 
for transparency of life, and will reduce the element of deceit 
and distrust, there can be no doubt. To affirm and deny now 
involve a momentum and carry a degree of conviction impos- 
sible before. It is the action of the orator that sways all be- 
fore him. Thus, rehearsing and enriching the old motor ac- 
tivities of the race in dancing form and making them a better 
expression of feeling and of reactions to experience, we may 
help to restore the lost motor accompaniments of thought 
itself, now stripped of so much of its pristine vigor and re- 
duced chiefly, as many researches recently summarized by De 
Sanctis show, to the changing tension of from one to three 
muscles of the forehead. ^Thus it has lost intensity and vivid- 
ness while gaining in range and abstraction. These exercises 
will tend to make thinking natural, sane, and vigorous, instead 
of the faint motor expressions of thought seen in muscle read- 
ing, and which are only attenuated relics of the more vivid 
and intense psychic states and processes from which modern 
thinking has shrunken. True dancing sets it again in scene 
as the mother lye restores defaced crystals. This also cannot 
fail to increase honesty, frankness, openness, and to make con- 
cealment and hypocrisy harder for the muscular system as a 
whole to lie than for words to do so. Bastian urges that we 
must conserve and, where possible, restore the fresh first 
thoughts of primitive mankind, and rhythmical training of 
the body aids in doing so. 

As to the function of dancing as an organ of understand- 
ing and feeling music, I believe it is not going too far to urge 
that no music of any kind is or can be fully comprehended 
without motor accompaniment. If a player or singer under- 
stands music because, he is performing it better than the mere 
passive listener, when to both it is new, do not cadenced steps, 
poses, and movements also help to deeper appreciation ? Music 
always means motion, or at least posture. We see this in 
catchy marches with strongly accentuated rhythm, not to speak 



70 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

of music that is descriptive of waves, winds, and storm, but I 
maintain that all true music prompts us to act it out. A motor- 
minded g-enius occasionally appears who interprets music to 
others thus. Rapid listening is only one and a psychologically 
very small element in man's natural response to it. We really 
feel and know music in the muscles, and its phrases are rightly 
called motives. Thus in a modern concert we only enjoy 
music in a lazy, decadent way, and, if the future is to be more 
virile, both composers as well as hearers will be benefited by 
the new interpretation of it as efferent poetry. This, too, is 
a larger interpretation of dancing. Much national music is 
simply based upon national dances, and can only be imper- 
fectly understood when these dances have become obsolete. 
Thus to revive such dances, or to create others from the music, 
is necessary for the completion of the latter. 

Thus, again, the wondrous charm of dancing is due to the 
fact that when unconstrained and free these movements still 
really express those activities in which our forebears uttered 
most of the energies of their bodies and their souls. It re- 
stores ancient body habits dwindled to rudiments in the forms 
of modern industries which lay stress only on special activities, 
for dancing is generic. It not only strengthens the muscles, 
but gives us more control over them. 

Gesture, Pantomime, and Mimesis. — Gestures are move- 
ments addressed to the eye with the purpose of communica- 
tion. They constitute sign language, and sematology is the 
systematic knowledge we have of them. They are written in 
the air, and despite many attempts have had as yet no ade- 
quate notation, and, till the kinetoscope, could not be recorded, 
for verbal descriptions of them are cumbrous, partial, and 
often ambiguous. Loss of the power to understand them, 
asemia, is almost as basal as apraxia, and involves more funda- 
mental neuro-psychic lesion than do the aphasias. They may 
be limited to the face or hand or even to parts of them, or may 
involve nearly all the voluntary muscles. Gestures have at- 
tained a high degree of development among the Indians of 
the United States because the population has been sparse; 
there were fifty-five radically different linguistic stocks un- 
intelligible to each other, and intertribal must constantly sup- 
plement intratribal communication. Hunting, too, favors si- 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 7^ 

lence and signs. ^ On the prairies and on the west coast, where 
languages are most diverse, the Chinook jargon arose, as did 
pigeon Enghsh in China ; such mongrel species of language 
need to be supplemented by florid gesticulation. Among the 
Cistercian monks, with their vow of silence, a highly arbitrary 
and artificial system was evolved. Deaf mutes, too, not only 
tend to develop signs, but learn them so readily that those 
who insist on the articulation method, as do the Germans and 
most Americans as opposed to the French scheme of develop- 
ing natural signs which enables them better to communicate 
with each other but less with normal people, find it very hard 
to repress this instinctive mode of conveying meaning.^ 
Gestures are favored by secrecy, and the Sicilian Vespers 
were said to have been planned without writing or vocaliza- 
tion; and the subjects of Dionysius, the tyrant of ancient Syra- 
cuse, resorted to them when speech was forbidden. Operators 
in factories, amidst the noise of machinery, have become to 
some degree histrionic adepts. Lively feelings, a vivid imag- 
ination, and great vitality predispose to this primitive mode 
of utterance, and civilization is often said to reduce this an- 
cient seasoning and coloration of speech. Sittl ^ has shown 
in great detail how highly it was developed in classical an- 
tiquity as an integral part of religious and other festive dances 
which were often very pantomimic on the stage, with three 
gestural systems — cordax for comedy, emilia for tragedy, and 
sicinis for satire — partly because the audience was so large 
and masks precluded facial mimesis and modified vocalization. 
Canon de Jorio, in a great work ^ with many pictorial illus- 
trations, has shown how in the Neapolitans the gestures of 
ancient Rome not only survived, but became still more devel- 
oped as expressions of a vivacious diathesis which so predis- 

^ See the voluminous and illustrated collection of these in Garrick Mallery's 
Sign Language among North American Indians. Annual Report of the Bureau of 
Ethnology, 1879-80, pp. 269-552. 

^ See J. Heidsiek, Der Taubstumme und seine Sprache. Woywod, Breslau, 
1889. 318 p. See, also, Annals of Deaf Mutes. Washington, 1875, and Reports 
of the Hartford Institute for Deaf Mutes, where the natural signs were long used. 

3 Sittl, Karl, Die Gebarden der Griechen und Romer. Teubner, Leipzig, 1890, 
386 p. 

^ Jorio, Andrea di, La Mimica degli Antichi investigata nel gestire Napoletano. 
Napoli, 1832, 380 p. 



72 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

poses to it that the rower drops his oar and the day laborer 
his tool to answer, and, in the dark, speech seems almost tame 
and bloodless. This he ascribes in part to an exceptional in- 
nate liveliness of temperament and objective modes of thought 
and life aided by the momentum of both tradition and heredity. 
Austin ^ has shown how the orators of ancient and modern 
times made their art action, and many more recent rhetori- 
cians have classified the position and movements of hands, 
arms, feet, legs, face, and the entire body, and would em- 
phasize nearly every line of public address by graphic and 
vehement activities to enhance the effectiveness of their words. 
Many a writer from Engel to Piderit,^ to say nothing of 
rhetorical and dramatic schools from Henischius to Delsarte, 
have striven to conserve or restore the old, deep-seated instinct, 
believing that vivid and intense sentiment of conviction of 
truth which the world desires and also the complete dramatic 
illusion of reality could be both felt by the speaker and con- 
veyed to others best by talking not with the tiny muscles in- 
volved in articulation, but with nearly all the possibilities of 
voluntary motion. 

These are the influences that have favored the survival 
and development of gesture or prevented it from lapsing 
toward the position of a lost art, but they have also resulted 
in the addition of many artificial and conventional signs often 
very hard to distinguish from those which are most immediate 
and natural. Some gestures consist of tracing outlines or 
drawing in the air, and, if recorded, would be very like some 
of the pictographs of Egypt or the script of old Mexico, for 
some of their characters seem only written gesture. Gesture 
has some points of very vital contact with plastic art and with 
heraldry, and shades into primitive modes of dancing by im- 
perceptible gradations. Some gestures are instinctive and uni- 
versal among all people, and others, like, e. g., the manual 
alphabet of the deaf mutes, are deliberate inventions. Gestures 
are often classified, by none more rigidly than by Wundt,^ 

'Gilbert Austin: Chironomia. Cadell, London, 1806, 583 p. 

^ Piderit, Theodor, La mimique et la physiognomonie. Bailliere, Paris, 1888, 
280 p. 

3 Wundt, W. M., Volkerpsychologie. Die Sprache. I. Theil. I Bd. Engel- 
mann, Leipzig, 1900, pp. 131-243. 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 73 

who makes them to be referensive, imitative, codesignative, 
and symbolic, and even describes their very etymology and 
syntax to all such rubrics and categories, which, while helpful 
to the novice in this field of study, are inadequate, and seem 
first artificial and then encumbrances as he proceeds. Social 
forms and ceremonies often involve gestures, and these tend 
to become stereotyped, and then outgrown and thrown off by 
exuviation like fashions. Instead of prostrating and kowtow- 
ing, we bow, scrape, and courtesy ; then nod, then wave the 
hand without lifting it near the head, and, instead of embrac- 
ing and kissing, we touch finger tips. For Spencer,^ gestures 
are motor discharges of the same kind but of less intensity than 
the movements which once satisfied the feeling that caused 
them. Out of a vast profusion the fittest are slowly selected. 
For Darwin - they are survivals of movements once directly or 
indirectly useful, if not purposeful, the opposite movements 
expressing opposite feelings and intensity causing overflow 
into unaccustomed channels. Gratiolet and Piderit think 
gesture best explained by reference to imaginary objects of 
sense. They reproduce either faintly or in an exaggerated 
way what we should do if the object of experience was pres- 
ent. Hence, their abundance and intensity are as that of our 
mental images. All these views are not only helpful but true, 
but each of them only of gestures of a certain type, while others 
are left quite unexplained by all the theories hitherto proposed. 
To understand gestures we must go far back of the con- 
scious purpose of communication and the broad general prin- 
ciple that every psychic act or change is attended by a physical 
one. Not only are the emotions essentially motive, as the term 
implies, with concomitant, vascular, cardiac, intestinal, meta- 
bolic, and secretive changes such as blushing, pallor, palpitation, 
relaxation of sphincters, tears, horripilation, nausea, and with 
modification of all the activities of the involuntary or non-stri- 
ated muscles, but thought and will also always play upon volun- 
tary muscles, causing changes of tension, and minimal as well 
as maximal movements. The superciliary and corrugator mus- 

^ Spencer, Herbert, The Principles of Psychology. Appleton, New York, 1883, 
vol. 2, p. 336-366. 

^ Darwin, C. R., The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals. Ap- 
pleton, New York, 1873, p. 340-374. 



74 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

cles have been called the muscles of thought, and their activity, 
gestures of intellection ; and it is a familiar fact that planchette 
and so-called mind reading is nothing but muscle reading. 
Thought would probably be impossible with the most perfect 
brain if all the egresses were blocked. Efferent processes con- 
stantly play not only upon vocal organs, but upon every part 
and process of the body, and every psychosis has or is its own 
somatosis. Psychology is at least not yet able to demonstrate 
the existence of a single sensation that is purely afferent, and 
that leaves the emissive tracts unaffected, and animal life itself 
is predominantly, if not essentially, motile, i. e., expressive. 
From that broad basis a truly genetic doctrine of speech must 
take its departure. Pure feelings, thoughts, volitions are ab- 
stractions, and even sensations are only stimulus directives of 
outward currents and sensory centers — are only more intimate 
parts of the objective world, the essence of the soul being the 
apparatus or function of response which alone can give both 
reality and actuality to life, inner or outer. With the first 
animal, the first convulsive movement is also the very ipsis- 
simal essence of the first sense of pain, and the same principle 
holds of every first feeling or sensation or of every new in- 
tensity of either. The first voluptuous experience was the first 
erection, the first cry, the first discomfort, and there was no 
content or inner side. The latter evolved slowly after repeti- 
tions had left their memory traces on the plastic nerve centers 
which gradually acquired a degree of independence and later 
some power of initiative, and this, once a mere subjective ac- 
companiment, still later transmits its effects by heredity, so 
that in the newborn the primal somatic origin of all feeling 
states is less pure. This view must not obscure the law that 
all interior states, however, arise primordially from somatic 
changes, and the brain, which is the unique organ of registra- 
tion, can record nothing else than the results of bodily re- 
sponses. The law that life is response is seen in all studies of 
instinct and habits of animals which are only organic memories, 
and even in plant physiology, as is shown by the experiments 
of Bose. Hence, every movement in the animal world is in 
a very generalized and fundamental sense the matrix of its 
own psyche. Real, natural, and instinctive gestures arise out 
of activities from which they are at least one and perhaps 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 75 

many degrees removed, for some elements of reality are always 
wanting. 

<&/e^i^^ is of many kinds. Prostration, kowtowing, salaaming, 
grovelling, striking the earth with the forehead, offering the neck 
to be trodden on, kissing the ground — these are attenuated to cour- 
tesy with spreading and lifting the skirts, bowing profoundly, often 
in very elaborate ways, doffing the hat, once as a symbol of freedom, 
removing the shoes, washing the feet, with special toilets for meet- 
ing great personages, and finally the slight nod and wave of the 
hand toward, but not touching, the head. The embrace has declined 
to the hand-clasp and shake, or even touching the finger tips, where 
we have, too, the slang gesture of shaking one's own hand upon 
seeing an acquaintance, and blowing the kiss. Detailed expressions 
of joy at meeting fine down to a faint, flitting smile of recognition. 
These express all degrees of delight at meeting others, from trans- 
ports of rapture, frisking, and capering, or highly artificial obei- 
sances down to mere recognition, and then pass over into ignoring, 
cutting, and up the scale of hostile manifestations to personal con- 
flict. There are gestures of abject servility that not only seem to 
place one's life in the hands of a superior, but actually invite him 
to take it, but this was succeeded as the world advanced in demo- 
cratic ideas of equality by an instinct to greet others precisely as 
cordially as they do us. A part of what is called manners consists 
of gestures of salutation, and mediates instinctive likes and dislikes 
on the instant, and courtesy and breeding have no better touch- 
stone. " How much does the new acquaintance like and respect me, 
and how much shall I show him any return," expresses the sub- 
dominant and ancient state of mind. From similar principles arose 
formulae of subjection in war: laying down arms, saluting the vic- 
tor's flag, passing under the yoke, surrendering the sword, kissing 
the conqueror's feet, embracing his knees, etc. Close akin are many 
gestures of worship, which consist of voluntary self-humiliation be- 
fore a divine potentate. Here, again, we have prostration, even 
with the face in the dust, bowing the head, kneeling, irivoking mercy, 
various gestures of contrition, mourning in sackcloth and ashes, 
gestures of mortification and even self-mutilation, offering one's 
self up, etc. Many acts of worship are only gestures of reverence, 
adoration, self-renunciation. Man slowly ceased to cringe and cower 
before the gods, and learned to invoke them like the statue of the 
Greek youth in prayer, erect, with open, upturned face and arms ex- 
tended in welcome and in petition. 

Being strongly motor-minded, I selected and listed a hun- 
dred serial motor operations with which I am more or less 
familiar, such as eating a piece of meat, opening, pouring, and 
sipping a glass of Apollinaris; opening and using a napkin, 



76 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

sawing a stick of wood, shuffling and dealing cards, counting 
bills, sharpening a razor and shaving, striking a match and 
smoking, dressing and undressing, playing bilhards, throwing 
and catching a ball, writing, taking down, opening, and read- 
ing a book ; loading and shooting, playing various instruments, 
rowing, tennis, bowling, shopping, hoeing, washing, wring- 
ing, driving a nail, peeling an apple, folding and sealing a 
letter, making a fire, prying out a stone, spinning and weaving, 
husking corn, chopping, shoveling, etc., all requiring manipu- 
lation, and practiced the movements involved in each process, 
but only with imaginary objects or implements. At the outset, 
those before whom I exhibited interpreted my dumb show 
correctly in every case, and usually with a promptness that 
surprised me. I was still more astonished, however, to find 
how clumsy, incorrect, and often halting were my efforts. 
Where it was convenient to do so, I practiced alternating with 
real objects or tools, and then without them in pantomime, 
and found that, while I could thus add many details and 
greatly increase the fidelity of my mimicry, the latter was still 
very inaccurate in particulars, and often most so in those most 
habitual and automatic. By persistent practice some of these 
motor compositions grew quite elaborate, and the vocabulary 
of movement items multiplied, and I almost seemed to be 
handling the real things. It was often difficult to avoid exag- 
geration; facial and sometimes inter jectional accompaniments 
were hard to repress, despite the unreality of it all. It was 
a vivid language, and the gymnastics of these performances 
afforded such a variety of exercises that they seemed to open 
suggestions for a new hygiene of body and mind. Such active 
work with the old labor canticles that once accompanied some 
of them, a few of which are now being restored when set to 
appropriate songs, as is now sometimes done in the movement 
games, as we have seen, of the kindergarten, also now receiv- 
ing much attention, as it did two or three centuries ago in 
training for the stage dancing and pantomime as well as 
dramatic schools. This work is highly conducive to unity and 
harmony of body and soul. There are here both psychological 
and pedagogical possibilities that should be explored. Such 
imitative activities, if rightly environed and sanely used in the 
curriculum of motor education, cannot fail to tend to idealize 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 77 

labor in the minds of children, and they afford just those 
rudiments of primitive and even modern industries and occu- 
pations as are fitted in the order of growth to give betimes 
proper insight into and sympathy with these aspects of both 
toil and play, for both are at the same time recapitulatory and 
preparatory for a large domain of human life. They give a 
most wholesome stimulus to the imagination, and also quicken 
observation. Such abridged, poetized versions of character- 
istic human activities have underlain most of the many popular 
festivals of mediaeval Europe, in which the processes of phys- 
ical toil were at the same time made into play and dance and 
elevated to symbols of man's lordship over nature, while some 
of them became almost sacraments by association with myths 
and festive rites. 

Many other rites and gestures besides those for general com- 
munication express social and personal relations to our fellow men. 
Negation is shaking of the head, and was very primitive. Thus the 
child turns from its mother's breast or avoids proffered food. This 
gesture of refusal or dissent is very widespread, although some 
races, like the Arabs, toss the head up and back, clicking the tongue 
to signify breaking off. In all cases, the mouth is turned away, as 
if the original "no" meant "I will not eat it." This gesture may 
be accompanied by turning away the whole body and manual ges- 
tures of rejection, which make the act of declination more emphatic. 
Instead of talking face to face in harmony, recusants turn from 
each other to pursue their own way and will. Yes, expressed by 
nodding, is a good instance of a contrary meaning uttered by a con- 
trary movement. The bow, or assent, was perhaps originally ac- 
cepting food by inclining the head to grasp it with lips or jaws. 
Now it is accepting another's suggestion, and some think the nod 
is a relic of subordination, as of being second to the originator and 
propounder of the proposition, and to that extent becoming his fol- 
lower. So old and widely intelligible are these expressions that stiff- 
neckedness means inability to bow in agreement or obedience, and I 
have heard a stubborn man described as prone to shake his head 
vigorously when alone; but meekness is typified by the head always 
lowered. There are many gestures of invitation : beckoning with 
the finger, with palm uppermost, or with the hand, with one or both 
palms, holding the hands out — all of which mean come. But its op- 
posite, repulsion, has far more forms and shades of meaning. Re- 
jection is waving away or pushing off. There is also an upward or 
forward movement of ejection, or throwing out, and this may 
be emphasized by many more explicit gestures, even striking and 
butting and simulated forms of attack, shaking both fists, nodding 



78 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

obliquely in threat, defiance, with raised chin and perhaps the back 
of the fingers bent at the knuckles beneath it, and contempt snaps 
and even twiddle fingers, while the famous mano cornata (the in- 
dex and middle finger extended horizontally toward a person or 
object, with the thumb and other fingers folded), Jorio says, has in 
Southern Italy at least twenty distinct meanings, such as avaunt, 
stop, cease, drop it, warding off an evil eye, breaking a charm, spell, 
or hoodoo, etc. 

Pointing and looking designate any object, real or imaginary, in 
any direction, and at almost any distance, and so does drawing its 
outline in the air. More commonly, however, some attribute is 
selected and imitatively suggested. Rain, e. g., is depicted by both 
hands held high, with wrists and fingers limp and hanging down; 
water by tmdulatory movements with the open hand, palm down- 
ward ; smoke by twirling the forefinger upward as smoke curls ; a 
stone by lifting and throwing movements, and perhaps pointing to 
or touching the teeth to indicate its hardness; a blaze, candle, or 
torch by blowing on the erect forefinger ; a tent or wigwam by cross- 
ing two or more fingers ; a tree by holding the hand up, with fingers 
apart, like branches; grass by some movement with the hand held 
low, and growth by rhythmical pulsing movements upward; a bird 
by pecking with thumb and finger together, like a bill; a goat by 
stroking an imaginary beard-; an ass by wagging the hands, each 
side of the head, like ears, or with two hands together, open, with 
thumbs for ears and mouth open by drawing down the apposed little 
fingers, as very many creatures and objects can be represented by 
hand-made shadowgraphs, in the production of which variety stage 
experts sometimes attain great proficiency, as was and still is seen 
in the shadow-play theatres of Europe, as Miss Curtis has described 
them; an ox or cuckold by a gesture of horns; a ram by that of 
butting; a horse or riding by two fingers of one hand astride the 
vertical open palm of the other; a bear by imitating its paw with 
the hand; a white man by drawing the outline of a stove-pipe hat in 
the air (Indian) or taking it off (deaf mute) ; a woman by drawing 
the finger across the forehead, to indicate her shorter, or cut off 
stature, or drawing it down the side of the face under the chin to 
suggest bonnet strings; a baby by dandling the other elbow; the 
speechlessness of an infant and the toothlessness of an old person by 
the finger laid across the mouth horizontally or pressed into it; the 
sun by making a round circle with the thumb and forefinger or both 
hands; money by a smaller circle with one — all these are samples of 
standard gestures indicating objects. Colors may be designated by 
pointing at the lips for red, teeth for white, sky for blue, trees and 
grass for green. 

Another group of gestures signify mental processes, such as the 
effort to remember, indicated by tapping the forehead; forgetfulness 
by scowling, turning the head, shaking the hand before the face, 
or striking the forehead; to think by bowing the head, shading the 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 79 

eyes with the hand ; mental by the act of manual prehension and 
apperception, or knowing that we know by clasping one closed hand 
with the other; wisdom or thinking by laying the forefinger on or 
beside the nose and, conversely, folly is sometimes indicated by pla- 
cing the little finger there ; lightness by laying the two forefingers 
together; silence or attend by holding up the forefinger and fixa- 
ting; surprise and incredulity by elevating the brows, protruding the 
lips, and sucking in the breath audibly ; none or nothing by throw- 
ing both hands out; number by counting the fingers; many or accu- 
mulation by clawing or grasping together with both hands. 

Very many moral acts and qualities can be designated by gesture, 
such as lying, by thrusting a curved forefinger obliquely from the 
mouth for " speaking crooked "; a truth by a straight out movement; 
lying is also designated by the two little fingers hooked and the 
others crooked and sprinted apart; baldness and rejection by throw- 
ing a closed hand down, out, and opening the fingers; contempt, or 
indifference by snapping the fingers; theft by the hand half shut, 
fingers apart, about to grasp furtively ; miserliness by rubbing the 
thumb and forefinger; coquettishness by placing the forefinger 
against the head, inclined to the side; justice by holding scales; con- 
scious beauty by the thumb and finger each side the outer corners 
of the mouth and looking pretty ; ugliness the same, with face awry ; 
friendship by locking the two forefingers or all the fingers ; strength 
by clenching the fist and clutching the biceps and perhaps a violent 
downward throwing movement; too bad, or mild reproach, by pla- 
cing the upper lip over the lower lip perhaps after a dental lingual 
smack; don't know or care by a shrug, as if to throw the matter off 
one's shoulders ; conscious pride by a swaggering gait, with arms 
akimbo in a woman or hands in the pockets or behind the back in 
a man; drunkenness with reeling, and perhaps hiccoughing after a 
drinking gesture ; despicableness by sneering and turning up the 
nose. Indecent gestures are legion in number. Perhaps in this 
category also belong much of the motivation which impels children 
to make faces at others. 

One class of gestures are vulgar and analogous to slang. Such 
are those of kicking one's self for remorse or regret; incredulity by 
pulling at the collar or neckgear, suggesting something too big to 
swallow; by pulling down the lower eyelid to suggest that the eyes 
are open or that there is nothing green there ; craziness by whirling 
the open finger or even the hand about the head, suggesting wheels; 
intrusive confidence by winking with one eye ; trying to laugh at a 
poor joke by tickling one's self; effort by wiping the forehead with 
the hand or thumb, with a motion of flipping gouts of sweat upon 
the ground; decapitation by drawing the finger across the throat 
with a guttural k-h of spurting blood. Perhaps here, too, belong 
touching one's own head, shaking it, and pointing to another to sug- 
gest daftness, and yawning by opening the flattened hands at the 
wrist, which sometimes causes it in others 'by suggestion. 



8o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Mien, mimesis, gesture, and pantomime, can together express 
every one of the feehngs and emotions more graphically and for- 
cibly than words can do. Roscius, who could express a content in 
most ways, if that content were in the sphere of sentiment, might 
well have won over Cicero in the reputed contest. Strictly speaking, 
the inflections and stress that accompany speech are emotive ges- 
tures that enforce and illustrate the meaning of words, and vocaliza- 
tion, out of which language sprung, was itself first merely almost 
an incidental and accidental accompaniment of gesture. Emotional 
gestures, it is said, are less differentiated than intellectual ones, but 
this is because feeling is itself a more generalized form of mentation, 
and the same also is true of the terms used for feelings which are 
very inadequate and not sharply discriminated. Without gesture in 
the largest sense, we should know little or nothing about the feel- 
ings, and in its impending work of penetrating the field of emo- 
tional life psychology will find one of its new highways to this goal 
when opened up to lie through the interpretation of natural gestures. 

When we turn to the volitional life, we find, again, that gestures 
can be more contentful than words, and can reproduce nearly every 
typical act and occupation of the human life with great fidelity to 
copy and with little miscarriage in communication. Such holo- 
phrastic motor talk is, to be sure, vastly harder than merely oral 
speech, the economy or laziness of which tends to depletion of con- 
tent. Dramatic reproduction may be very hard work. Our muscles 
are not taut enough to talk with the eloquence of action of our 
palaeolithic forebears, and so our mode of expression is 'attenuated, 
and mentation is " sicklied o'er with the pale cast of thought " till 
its reality often seems wan and spectral. In recounting to others 
and perhaps even, in recalling to themselves, men were once redoers 
of deeds. They did not hawk, trill, whisper, sibilate to the secret 
ear, which they could do in darkness, but reenacted all to the eye in 
the open light of day. They used no merely lingual or dactylic 
tongue, but their ideographs were formed more with the funda- 
mental than the accessory muscles. This mode of communication has 
nothing esoteric, is not limited to a single tribe or circle that knows 
but one tongue and so needs no hermeneutics, but would be intelli- 
gible to the polyglot world, for there is no divorce between words 
and things, no nominalism but only dynamic realism in thought and 
life. No form of converse is so anschaulich, so compelling of atten- 
tion and sympathy and withal so exhilarating to both orator and 
audience, and for this reason this pristine mode of imparting mental 
states passed naturally and inevitably into the primitive dances which 
set forth in idealistic form not only every emotion with profuse 
stage setting, but every typical phase of human activity, domestic, 
social, vocational, religious, and all the rest, and these have been 
invested with such charm that they have very often survived the 
last vestige of their original meaning. 

One class of gestures is immediately connected with the senses, 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 8i 

each of which has its own group. For the tactile sense, there is 
stroking, patting, and the comic gesture of touching with the finger 
tip indicating touchiness, mimetic tickhng, etc. A bad smeh is indi- 
cated by constricting the nostrils or holding the breath, perhaps 
pointing to the sources of the bad odor, a common form of insult 
among children. A sneer is in part evolved from this latter indica- 
tion of malodorousness and of repulsive flavors, while agreeable 
perfume or olfactory testing is expressed by sniffing. Good taste is 
indicated by smacking the lips and bad by opening the mouth, pro- 
truding the tongue and drawing up the lips, perhaps with incipient 
gagging and the mimesis of nausea, perhaps of vomiting. Hunger is 
expressed by hollow cheeks and pointing to the slightly opened mouth, 
and eating and drinking may be elaborately mimicked, satiety being 
indicated by rubbing or patting the stomach and starvation by press- 
ing it in. Closing the ears with the fingers suggests loud or dis- 
agreeable sounds, and holding the hand to the ear means a faint 
sound, listen or speak louder, as indeed does even turning the head 
or leaning forward to bring the preferred ear nearer the sources of 
acoustic stimulation. Scowling and fixating, real or imaginary, by 
shading the eyes with the hand, holding up one hand to each eye 
as if the former were the tubes of an opera glass, casting down the 
eyes in shame or modesty, rolling them upward in prayer, closing 
them with, perhaps, nodding the head or resting it inclined on one 
side upon the hand for sleep, turning up the eyes, showing the whites 
below the iris for death, looking down and obliquely with elevated 
and inclined head for despicableness or looking down upon, fierce 
corrugation of the brows in anger, opening them widely in sur- 
prise and fright, fixating afar with eyes wide open as a sign of 
abstraction, dreamy revery, blinking, rubbing the eyes for sleepi- 
ness, wildly rolling them for shock and confusion, etc. — these indi- 
cate the wide range of expressiveness of which the lids and brow 
are capable, the eyeball itself, the center of all these changes, re- 
maining perhaps unchanged. This class of gestures begins in in- 
fancy with taste and later with sight responses and evolves from 
these foci in mouth and eye. Well on in childhood, at an age ex- 
tremely variable with individuals, these spontaneous reactions may 
become voluntary, and at about the same time they can be re- 
pressed. When consciousness can thus control them, they may be 
simulated toward imaginary stimuli, that is, sense gestures are sus- 
ceptible of a high degree of evolution, and may thus come to ex- 
press perhaps as great a variety of impressional, moral, and intel- 
lectual reactions to the world, as all that large class of words them- 
selves, which etymology shows once expressed pure sense action, and 
later became symbols or metaphors of highest qualities and activi- 
ties. We speak of good or bad taste in dress or art, bitter experi- 
ence, sweet memories, a clean heart, a dirty act, a foul deed, a 
white life, a bright example; we hear the voice of conscience, see 
truth which is the light of the world, etc. Indeed, science has been 
7 



82 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

defined as reducing the world and life to expression in the simplest 
terms of real or possible sense experience. If this be so, it follows 
that just in proportion as we think clearly and resolve the world 
of man to its simplest^ easiest, and most basal terms, we tend to 
restore at least in faint degree, the primitive facial mimesis which 
attends the activity of the different senses. This is to make think- 
ing natural as well as economic. In proportion as we think in 
mental images, we play upon their complex efferent apparatus, and 
it is this which gives content and reality to our mental processes and 
tends to prevent them from becoming merely formal or verbal. 
Hence it makes for honesty and truth. In deaf-mutes, these intense 
facial reactions are sometimes highly developed, and are important 
factors in communication, while the blind not only preserve the 
facial expression of infancy connected with the lower senses, but 
their psychic processes are reflected in movements about the eyes. 
These mimetic reflexes in their faces, although most developed about 
the lower senses, make their thought more palpable and literally 
add a peculiar natural force and eloquence to their higher and most 
abstract thought processes. The play of these sense factors in 
speech and thought give a visual and emotive accompaniment and 
reenforcement, as if these senses were themselves acting upon the 
mental content and, thus making thought process less remote and 
abstract, in a way that convention represses all too soon in the 
children of civilization, among whom conversation grows verbal 
and desiccated, because divorced from the rich life of sense and 
feeling out of which the intellect arose. The conservation and de- 
velopment of this element gives pristine vitality and force to dic- 
tion, freshness, wholesomeness, and even sanity to thought, approxi- 
mates it to action and feeling, makes it lively with pictorial and 
dramatic content, and prevents it from aridity which, for the aver- 
age man and woman, is the death of zest and the shabblonization of 
experience. 

Facial movements and gestures reflect and express every emo- 
tion, every shade of pain from acute physical to moral suffering, 
and of pleasure from that of sense to religious transport. Thus 
these all are uttered and understood by intimate acquaintances with- 
out words. Although these algedonic states can both be simulated 
and dissimulated, the range of control is limited in their stronger 
spontaneous expressions which may affect every muscle, voluntary 
and involuntary, and modify every physiological and metabolic proc- 
ess. This all-pervading somatic resonance of itself suggests that 
this is the oldest and most basal of psychic experiences. Pain, of 
course, shows very many shades and grades even in early infancy, 
when it culminated in the full, almost convulsive cry, with aban- 
don, which at its height is, perhaps, relatively to the total motive 
energy, the most intense degree of exercise the human individual 
ever puts forth, extending to every organic function. Laughing be- 
gins much later in an awkward way, and is at first far less em- 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 83 

phatic, and, even in riper years, is far more under the control of 
the will. In its intenser forms, its facial and general motor effects 
more closely resemble those of crying with tears. Both may cause 
local aches, and, when beyond control, each may pass into the other, 
as is seen in hysteria. This, however, is only when and because 
their degree is convulsive. Within normal limits, the two are es- 
sentially distinguished and contrasted in their physical expression 
and in their subjective state. In infancy, however, the feehng is 
the expression, and there is no causal or temporal sequence between 
the two, but only the relation of identity. Even the slighter shades 
of sadness and happiness consist in the reproduction of the physio- 
logical processes which in our ancestry, human and prehuman, were 
depressive or exhilarating, i. e., repressed or augmented life. The 
evolutionary formula for violent crying is pain and devitaHzation 
seeking relief by learning, as animal life can do, to draw upon 
kinetic reserves. There is no psychic state, save the feeling of the 
act of crying, its kind and its intensity. The movements themselves 
are the felted ontogenetic traces of rudiments of all the efforts the 
phylum has made to escape or resist pain, and these movements 
bring with them more or less of the ancestral pain, for motor cells 
and contracting tissue are the bearers of such hereditary functions. 
Deaf-mutes naturally become adepts in the use of this mother 
tongue of the race, and their gestures and those of savages are only 
dialects of the same primeval language. Both are surprisingly quick 
to catch salient points of strangers, and such new objects as glasses, 
long hair, mustaches, firearms, keys, tools, and things, are some- 
times described at first with very elaborate gesticulation, air-drawing, 
etc., and when once understood a single characteristic movement or 
posture is selected from a complex whole and suffices. Many 
spontaneovts gestures ^ may fairly be called universal, but upon them 
are now superposed more or less arbitrary symbols, such as touch- 
ing a part of the hand or the body for each letter, then dactylology, 
and last of all, articulation, taught at first by manipulating the 
mouth. These latter tend to repress gesture, which is indeed often 
forbidden, somewhat as the speech of adults still earlier in life 
checks the spontaneous evolution of speech in normal infants. By 
these movements, the language of the deaf loses its generic funda- 
mental character and becomes specific, alphabetic, and even phonic 
and thus much is lost and much gained. It is an inestimable advan- 
tage to speak, and parents prefer this method because it rescues their 
children from isolation and tends to make both almost forget the 
infirmity. Yet most deaf-mute children, when they first come to 
an institution where instruction is given, have already learned many 
gestures of much grace and even beauty. To penalize them for 

^ Hartmann, Arthur: Taubstummheit und Taubstummenbildung. Stuttgart, 
1880, 212 p., chap, xii on Gestures. See also J. H. Keep: Sign Language in Deaf- 
Mute Education. New England, vol. xxvi, 506 p. 



84 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

using these condemns the child to soHtude during all those gre- 
garious years required to learn articulation. Moreover, their voices 
are always hard and disagreeable and the children soon come to 
know it and, hence, often dislike to speak and perhaps cease to do 
so after leaving school. Training in speech is very hard for the 
voice and there is often great pain, while its quality deteriorates, 
for the speech is not natural, but is like walking with a partially 
atrophied leg. The use of signs to translate the meaning of words 
makes phonic instruction more rapid and contentful and shows what 
is and is not understood. Signs are so full, however, of power and 
life that they do strongly tend to encroach upon more artificial and 
later methods. Slovenly modes of speV;ch, like the Yankee dialect, 
are easier for deaf-mutes, as indeed they are for others, than is 
correctly spoken English, and clergymen who drop the use of manu- 
script and preach more naturally without notes often recover by 
so doing from clerical sore throat, but speech for deaf-mutes mag- 
nifies both these difficulties, for it is far harder than good English 
for the normal person or unanimated reading for the clergyman. It 
is, therefore, as cruel to forbid signs as it would be to forbid English 
on the street to beginners in Latin. It is also unpedagogic, for 
signs give vitality to speech that nothing else can supply. Hence, 
signs, finger-language and speech should be combined. 
^ We are told that in 190 a.d. the 6,000 pantomimists in Rome 
were retained in the city in a famine when strangers and philoso- 
phers were banished, so highly were these dumb actors prized. 
They were interpreters with people of unknown tongue and at- 
tended armies on their conquests and there were at least two 
schools : one dignified and serious- and the other sportive and often 
indecent; and so expert were they that the lives of great men were 
told by signs. Probably only deaf-mutes under favorable conditions 
can nearly approach this perfection, or could in the days when 
Abbe Lambert published his dictionaries of signs, but these had 
been repressed in the interests of articulation and lip-reading. 
Many of the simplest of these are tropes, especially metaphors 
which called the hero a hon, or metonomy which puts e. g. the 
sword for war, the concrete for the abstract, or synecdoche, which 
puts the roof for the house, the beard for the man, etc. Height is 
expressed by raising the hand or looking up; depth by the reverse; 
intelligence by tapping the forehead and looking wise; deafness 
by stopping the ears; blindness by laying the finger on the closed 
eye; the future by a wave of the hand in front and past time by 
a backward movement; long by drawing out as if a string from 
the other hand; stiffness by rigidity of body; dreams by a sleeping 
gesture and moving the fingers wildly before the closed eyes; a 
mirror is indicated by standing before it and making a toilet; a 
chair by the gesture of sitting in it; sand by letting it sift through 
the fingers; a fly by a movement of catching it; boots by putting 
them on; lightning by zigzag with the finger; old age by its pos- 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 85 

ture and gait; thunder by collapse of flexed joints; Jesus by point- 
ing to imaginary wounds in hands and feet; a doctor by feeling the 
pulse; etc. Most such signs are ideographic movements which 
all understand much more readily than they do the sometimes pain- 
fully artificial hollow cachophonous words which the German method 
produces, repressing both gestures and spontaneous noises as " in- 
human." ^ They are quite as designative as onomatopoesis is for 
sounds in nature and indeed are compared with it. 

Compound signs follow the same rubrics of origin, mode of use, 
form, effect for cause, and vice versa, general indication with 
specific marks, etc. For rich and poor there is first the sign for 
man and then the specific sign of the condition or the kind of man 
may be further designated, as little, dark, crooked, hungry, etc. 
To state that he is a father, the elbow is thrust forward from the 
right side as a sign of generation, with the reverse movement for 
mother. A boy is a man plus the sign for short stature, and for a 
girl, the sign of a headdress or long hair is added; assassin is in- 
dicated by the sign of stabbing with the thumb; a goose is a bird 
with a bill sign made with thumb and finger; a red rose is flower 
plus the act of smelling and perhaps thorns and touching the lips 
for red; snow is white, falling obliquely or of snowballing; boat is 
tracing its form plus the act of rowing; a calf is a quadruped with 
the sign for little and the gesture of sucking; a caterpillar is a 
worm with pointing to the hair and the gesture of gnawing leaves; 
a tablecloth is the act of spreading or smoothing it; a bee is desig- 
nated by the mimesis of stinging and of the hand swelling; a dog 
is indicated by patting the knee and imitation of its bark; hare is 
long ears, shooting, and eating with pleasure; apron, cravat, stock- 
ing, glove, by the act of putting them on; pump, swing, door, cradle, 
watch, etc., by the act of using them. 

The sign language knows neither noun, verb, article nor pro- 
noun and its syntax is radically different from that of oral speech, 
but the deaf-mute can represent the temporal sequence and in that 
he has the advantage of the artist. He can also abstract, localize, 
and accomplish much by assignment. He deals with roots and is 
greatly helped by trained teachers who are also deaf-mutes. Com- 
plex signs admit of and soon attain great development. Methodic 
and artificial signs are diverse, somewhat like, though less than, 
dialects or even languages sprung from one parent stem, and yet 
most diverse signs for the same object are easily understood by 
those accustomed to others. As accompaniments of words they have 
great explanatory power for normal persons, but are far more 
helpful in aiding the intelligibility of the somewhat ghastly vocaliza- 
tion of even the most expert articulators among the deaf. The 

^ See Heame's admirable articles describing many of these natural signs in the 
American Annals of the Deaf, beginning April, 1875, vol. xx, 73 p., and continued 
in four articles. 



86 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

teacher always has very much to learn from the pupil. The fact 
that many of the de I'Epee signs are highly artificial should not 
prejudice the cause of natural signs. 

Rudolph/ taking his departure from facial expression, finds six 
primitive forms of psychic excitation: viz., fear, concentrated en- 
ergy, repulsion and disgust, impulse to bite, eat and get, joy, 
malevolence, and hate. Beneath these lies only the principle of 
opposition, i. e., attraction toward the pleasant and aversion from 
the painful. From these he derives all the nine hundred and seven 
species and varieties of emotional expression depicted in his cuts, 
all presumably of his own very plastic face. This involves a 
very complex scheme of emotions which the author makes little 
attempt to justify or explain in detail. Indeed, it is impossible 
to evoke emotions of a very pure or strong kind at will, and very 
many, if not most, of these grimaces are so conscious and ar- 
bitrary that they are not readily intelligible and the significance 
given them by different writers would differ greatly. Even if the 
feeHngs were evokable by an experienced and skillful actor or 
pantomimist, no face is plastic enough to express them all, and 
each cast of countenance as well as each innate type of psychic 
disposition predisposes to excellence in some and efficiency in other 
forms of expression. This writer's face, e. g., is heavy and serious 
and his efforts at hilarity in all its forms are but little contagious 
and are hence lacking in interpretative efficiency. The face of these 
cuts is somewhat too old and rigid and not a few of the expres- 
sions are not pronounced enough. This defect is obtrusive, despite 
the fact that most of the physiognomies have been much retouched 
and given accessories in the way of modifications of the hair, beard, 
dress, and interpretative hand gestures. Conventionalities, such as the 
influence of certain well-known crucifixion faces, the Laocoon, etc., 
are manifest. In thirty-six general classes of expression are included 
facial gestures of each sense in action and in defect, as well as 
blowing, yawning, sneezing, etc. The Lange-James theory that the 
feeling is the physical expression may encourage writers of this kid- 
ney to make faces and then put a name to the feelings they think 
they express, but aside from a dozen or so fundamental emotions, 
such interpretations are as diverse as are the attempts to describe 
the sentiments and imagery of musical phrases. I have shown these 
and other similar cuts to children of various ages and find that 
lively girls in the early teens very quickly and readily reproduce 
almost every facial expression, and some are extremely clever in 
describing, often in very original phrases, the psychic states repre- 
sented. Whether they are innately less expert in making faces than 
boys or merely more reluctant to distort their features, they cer- 
tainly see more meaning in facial expression thus depicted than do 

' Rudolph, H.: Der Ausdruck der Gemiitsbewegungen des Menschen. Kiiht- 
mann, Dresden, 1903, 2 vols. 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 87 

boys. Yet the faces of girls unconsciously or instinctively reflect 
finer shades of emotion than do those of boys. In all such de- 
pictures the potent defects of movement and of changes of color 
are of course eliminated. This author refers to no authorities 
whatever save Darv^in and does not discuss the perhaps most prac- 
ticable of all questions in his field, viz., w^hether facial contortions 
of the kind he commends increase or reduce plasticity of the coun- 
tenance in its unconscious play. We believe it can no longer be 
doubted that most faces are less expressive than they could be if the 
natural expression of emotion were not checked, and that some such 
mimetic gymnastics should betimes be a part of the aesthetic educa- 
tion of all, not only to prevent rigidity of features but to widen the 
gamut of emotional life. Experiments in having children and youth 
make faces in imitation of a well-chosen series of cuts and then de- 
scribe what they express are greatly needed. The old admonition 
against face-making should thus give place to exercises of this 
faculty and these will no doubt soon be curriculized. 

Hughes's work ^ is the most belabored of all the recent books 
upon the subject and shows wide reading and much thought. It is 
written from the standpoint of a voluntaristic psychology, for he 
says ours is an age of will and deeds. He strives to be in a 
sense genetic and his interest centers about the question how nat- 
ural, instinctive movements are transformed into symbolic expres- 
sions. He makes four chief kinds of emotional feelings, viz.: (i) 
mood (Stimmung), including jollity, joy, complacency, abandon, bad 
humor, ugliness, despair; (2) attention, ranging from liveliness and 
energy to wildness, rage, relaxation, exhaustion and unconscious- 
ness; (3) inclination, from love and benevolence to aversion and 
hate; and (4) respect, from reverence and honesty to modesty, 
shame, fear, and contempt, and he makes much use of opposition, 
laying ofif feelings along a plus and minus line each side of an in- 
different point, those of desire, its highest positive form of striving 
toward, shades through inclination to indifference, then rises nega- 
tively through aversion to resistance, the latter representing the 
negative pole of displeasure and the first the positive one of pleas- 
ure. So the rapture of enjoyment shades down through rest, which 
is neutral, to pain, the highest evaluation through indifference to 
contempt, genuineness into falsity. Many of his characterizations 
are graphic, but there is the tendency that besets most literature 
upon this subject to overnormalization, the analyses are too refined 
and the rubrics more or less speculative and systemization is over- 
done. Although his work is chiefly devoted to conscious and pur- 
posive gesture, the phenomena of natural expressions are the key 
to nearly all his problems, so that in passing these over so lightly 
one's verdict upon the validity of his conclusions often hovers in the 

^Hughes, Henry: Die Mimik des Menschen. Alt, Frankfurt a. M., 1900, 
423 P- 



88 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

air. The style is often prolix and even tedious. The author pro- 
fesses to be genetic, but his interpretation of this word will prove 
misleading to all interested in evolutionary origins. Hence the 
work is not sufificiently concrete or empirical, but hovers somewhat 
in the air. The descriptions are often excellent, such as those of 
desire, uncertainty, searching, triumph, the food quest, jollity, 
sycophancy, etc. 

The most elaborate and systematic work on the basis of Del- 
sarte, who published nothing, is that of Giraudet,^ who would have 
people dance and sing with the same freedom with which they walk 
and speak respectively and who pleads for a new sestheticism as an 
" emanation of the soul." He lays less stress upon the Delsartian 
symbolic philosophy than did Abbe Delaumosne - and is more prac- 
tical than Arnaud.^^ Life is action and this is expressed in man 
in seven hundred and twenty-nine kinds of dynamic phenomena 
grouped in a trinitarian way and all classified as either constitutional, 
habitual, or fugitive. His cuts of passional attitudes and expressions 
of eyebrows, nose, mouth, head postures, shoulders, arms and hands, 
trunk, legs and feet are mostly characteristic and distinctive and 
have contributed much to revive Delsartian studies for the stage in 
France where they had sadly declined. 

Will interferes with the purest manifestation of expressive 
gesture, says Kohnstamm,* which is at bottom involuntary utter- 
ance of feeling. As its purest indicator, such expressive moments 
have immense importance as revealers of associations of our entire 
psycho-physic apparatus. They are the physiological equivalents of 
the feelings and begin perhaps among the very first expressions of 
life. The telo-kinetic end is a relief. Their purposefulness is great, 
but without consciousness. One principle underlies the visceral or 
smooth and also the voluntary or striate muscles. As anger checks 
sensations of the secretions of the fluids of the stomach, so hypno- 
tism may influence menstruation and possibly ovulation. 

Albert Boree ^ makes a valuable contribution to the material for 
a theory of physiognomy. He has for many years been connected 
with the theater, and attempts here to assume for the benefit of 
actors and painters and sculptors ten groups of facial expression 
for the various sentiments. It is indeed a brief dictionary of the 
characteristic expressions of the various emotions. All are photo- 

'■ Giraudet, Alfred: Mimique. Physionomie et Gestes. Paris, 1895, 128 p. 
2 The Delsarte System of Oratory. Tr. by F. A. Shaw. Werner, Albany, 1887, 

546 p. 

^ F. Delsarte: Ses decouvertes en esthetique, sa science, sa methode, precede 

de details de sa vie. 1882, 258 p. 

iKohnstamm, O.: Die biologische Sonderstellung der Ausdrucksbewegungen. 
Jour. f. Psychologic und Neurologic. 1906, Band 7, p. 205-222. 

5 Etudes Physiognomoniques. Les Expressions de la Figure Humaine. Laurens, 
Paris, 30 p. 



VALUE OF DANCING AND PANTOMIME 89 

graphed from a single face and in all there are one hundred and 
nineteen of them. 



As thus interpreted, is it not plain that the new danciqg 
should be taught in every school, even if it has to be open even- 
ings for that purpose? The dances chosen should be simple, 
rhythmic, and allowing great freedom. We should select from 
the best of all nations those most fit for each age, and cur- 
ricularize them to cultivate a sense of rhythm, ease, economy, 
and grace of movement. There should be great variety, and 
pose, balance, control, ease, presence ; bearing should be the 
goal rather than posturing or feats of agility. Rightly con- 
ducted, some of these old dances might be made the very best 
basis on which the sexes in the adolescent ages could meet. 
They palliate instead of increase the sense of awkwardness, 
and are just formal enough to give a certain regimentation to 
this intercourse, and they place the two sexes on an exact 
equality. They give also a sense of social solidarity. While 
aiming to bring out all the delight that inheres in such cadent 
movement to music, in themselves they should also aim to give 
pleasure to the beholder. Indeed, this latter element should 
never be absent. I know at least one young person who takes 
the greatest delight in choosing a musical selection and then 
working out with great ingenuity, phrase by phrase, with more 
changes than a poet makes in his lines, the suitable steps, 
pauses, turns, advances, recessions, bar by bar, until at last 
the music is set to a motor poem which fits it and nothing else. 
I have been surprised to see the great ingenuity displayed in 
this work, the sure rewards of patient and persistent effort, 
the extraordinary delight in repeating such a dance when per- 
fect, and have myself felt an exquisite pleasure in seeing it. 
Only by beginning with the school and cultivating a taste for 
better things and the ability to achieve them can the ballroom 
be reformed, and the evils that have gathered about this most 
artistic of all the forms of movement be eliminated. 

Another end to be aimed at in teaching all children to 
dance should be the implanting of a habit of so doing that 
should last on into maturity, not to say old age. In Merry 
Old England, and in the palmy days of the great French 
dances, matrons with gray hair went through the minuet and 



90 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

pavane with their grandfathers. Young people of high- 
school age, especially girls who show the least sign of talent 
or genius in this field ( for the domain gives the amplest scope 
for both), should be encouraged to elaborate original develop- 
ments upon musical themes or to dance out songs. 

There is probably nothing in the hedonic narcosis that 
cestheticians describe on beholding a masterpiece of art that 
may not be felt in seeing a terpsichorean performance of the 
highest merit. A German writer has entitled an article 
" Dancing as the Chief Joy and the Highest Expression of 
Life." When we reflect on all the historical varieties of de- 
scriptive dances — on its hygienic, euphoric, social; moral pos- 
sibilities — we may well ask the church whether it is not high 
time that it should cease to pour out the child with the bath, 
especially when we realize that the religious instinct would 
have been far feebler than it is to-day but for the development 
that the dance has given it, and that it can still teach reverence, 
awe, worship — that love of God is just as capable of motor 
expression as is romantic love. Many young clergymen and 
progressive churches are already beginning to bestir and in- 
form themselves, and to realize that the time is at hand when 
they must act in this matter.^ 

1 See Dictionnaire de la Danse, per G. Desrat. Paris, May et Motteroz, 1895, 
484 p. Also Der Tanz und seine Geschichte, von Rudolph Voss. Berlin, See- 
hagen, 1869, 402 p. 



CHAPTER III 

THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 

Music and mysticism — Music as an expression of the primordial activities 
of the soul — Its relation to dancing — Musical ecstacies and haunts — 
Educational value of music — Suggestions from the music of savage 
races — Relations to poetry and mythic themes — Musical capacities of 
very young children and their utilization — Experiments and tests upon 
discrimination, keys, range of voice — Questionnaire data, upon musical 
appreciation — Music and sex — Syngesthesias — Effects of barbaric music 
— Precocity and anamnesia — Singing — Effects of weather — Tonic sol- 
fa — Psychology of rhythm — Wind instruments and the violin — Place 
of the technique — Experiments on musical imagery — Inadequacy of 
musical instruction in colleges — Pedagogic value of the pianola prin- 
ciple — Musical training of teachers — Effects of music upon nerve 
poise — Teaching confidence in human nature. 

Thought and reason and their vehicle, speech, are all three 
of them novelties in the natural development history of the 
sold. In the dim past, psychic life was very different from 
what it is now; feeling, instinct, and impulse were all, and 
they were common to the whole race and to animals, while 
intellect not only came late but was largely an individual prod- 
uct, causing people to differ from each other and stand out 
from the species. It is of this older, larger, deeper, and more 
generic soul of man that music is the best and truest of all 
expressions, especially if with singing we consider gesture, 
mimesis, and dramatic action which arose with it. Music is 
the speech of this antique, half-buried racial soul. It did not 
evolve from love calls or charms alone, as Darwin thought ; 
nor did* it first appear as a tone-colored accompaniment to 
speech, as Spencer's broader theory taught, for it is older than 
language, as Weismann, Boas, and Gahltmattn- have shown, 
and capacity for musical culture is latent in many primitive 
races. Birds, which evolved long before man appeared on 

91 



92 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

earth, practiced this art, and so did animals and even insects, 
the very first of all creatures to emerge from the primeval sea. 
Indeed, if we stretch the term to its very uttermost and make 
music include all acoustic expressions, the wind, rain, thunder, 
sea, are the oldest of all musicians, for trees and brooks came 
later, after the land appeared. 

If we abandon ourselves to the very madness of mysticism. 
we may say that vibrations and impacts are as old as matter, 
heat, light, or even atoms and electrons. Probably all energy 
is rhythmic and cadenced, so that in this sense the music of 
the spheres which Plato thought the sweetest and most sym- 
phonic of all, even though we cannot hear it, is no longer 
myth but science. To all these influences, protoplasm, which 
is the sugared-off, vital product of the cosmic elements and 
processes, has responded from the first, for it is the material 
soul of the All. This pristine rapport was closer and more 
all-sided before any special acoustic sense was developed for 
it. Thus, though man has lost many of the old and subtler 
responses and perhaps has shed a whole series of ascending 
rudimentary organs for them, the human ear is the result of 
a longer development process, which has made it the highest 
and the most specialized organ of response to vibrations. But 
the influence of all these buried reactions still whispers among 
man's central neurons ; and, in his appreciations of pure music, 
reverberations are still awakened of the immemorial past when 
his personality was not yet so sphered and specialized out of 
the cosmic whole. Thus, in music, man may to-day dimly re- 
vive the most ancient elements and experiences in the history 
of his soul. If heredity is cell memory, the aesthetic response 
to music is the awakening of echoes far older than the earliest 
acoustic organs; and, in this process, man remembers the ear- 
liest as well as the subsequent stages of his evolution. It is 
the art of arts because most prehumanistic, and also most 
prophetic of the superman that is to be. 

It is this aspect of this sovereign art that can justify, if 
anything can do so, the enthusiastic characterizations' of it by 
writers like Mario Pilo ^ that it utters the essence of thinefs, 
best explains the world, is the chief interpreter of religion, 

^ Psychologie der Music. Leipzig, Wigand, 1906, 222 p. Ed. by C. D. Pflaum. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 93 

that it propounds and answers the ultimate problems of life, 
or gives at least a mystic meaning to Schopenhauer's phrases, 
that it is the last word of the highest philosophy, that it is the 
revealer of ultimate metaphysical being of the will and soul 
and of nature itself. Only from some such viewpoint can we 
see light in the utterances of German sestheticians who say 
that music expresses all the cosmic emotions, utters every 
potential as well as every actual feeling, that its kingdom is 
not of this present but also of the future world, and that it 
should be made the very most of because it strikes its roots 
deepest into the past and most securely shapes the future so 
that its home is in the infinite, that it shows everything under 
the form of eternity, that it utters all longings, even the dim- 
mest, puts us into rapport with stars, sea and dreams, and 
draws the ideal down from its fatherland in heaven, if, indeed, 
it itself be not the very essence of God. 

As the dance in the sense described in the last chapter is 
the purest poetry of motion, bringing out all the varieties of 
movement possible for the body as a mechanism, and thereby, 
on a theory that physical precedents condition psychic changes, 
evoking all the wide range of psychic states that motor atti- 
tudes and combinations can suggest, so music is the dance of 
the emotions. It is more and better than their gymnastics, for 
it also suggests impossible activities as well as passive move- 
ments. It compels every mood in the whole gamut of human 
experience, brings tension which may become almost rigidity, 
makes us feel that the cosmos is lawful to the very core, and 
that all is preordained in the sweep of ordered and controlled 
forces, and anon gives us a sense of exhilarating freedom, as 
if we lived in a world where nothing was impossible and our 
powers were adequate to transcend every regulation and over- 
come every obstacle. We realize our insignificance and the 
power of fate and iron necessity, which holds things in its 
bounds, and yet we feel that not only all that man has been 
or done in the world we could do, but vastly more. We 
glimpse the abysses of woe and the shining pinnacles of every 
joy. Music limbers each faculty, loosens and softens all that 
is hard in the soul, stretches out every faculty to its fullest 
dimension. Potentialities that slumber through all the rest of 
our lives are by this art once or twice thrilled just enough to 



94 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

make us realize that we live and die with vastly more in us 
than we ever know or dream ; and perhaps we sicken for an 
instant in the view of the flitting vistas that might open. We 
may lose all contact with present reality and float off expatiat- 
ing over the wide areas of racial experience that our individu- 
ality is vastly too restricted to realize. The limits of our 
personality become less opaque, more transparent, and the vast 
encompassing phyletic environment that stretches beyond is 
sensed. Perhaps the eye moistens, the heart throbs, we sigh, 
the muscles grow taut, we thrill and shiver, long for light, 
love, efficiency which we can never attain, or rather which in 
essence becomes our very own, though but just for a fleeting, 
tantalizing instant. Again, spontaneous images of the most 
diverse kinds, in the domain of the higher senses, and for 
some persons of every sense, with every degree of vividness, 
from shadowy dimness to almost illusory coercive power, 
sometimes utterly detached and disconnected and again se- 
quential and serial, crowd the imagination. We feel ourselves 
catching up forgotten themes that otherwise would have en- 
tirely lapsed from our lives and minds, perhaps working them 
out a while, then dropping them for others, and this cerebra- 
tion goes on in ways that actually transform the background 
of our conscious life. Thus we are sometimes impelled, al- 
though we know it not, up and on the evolutionary way of 
human development toward new regions and anticipate what 
man is to be in the future when he is more complete. But 
more probably most of these unique psychic experiences con- 
sist of rehearsing in vague snatches our vast ancestral history, 
which is usually submerged in ways that we cannot fathom or 
explain, till we know vastly more of the modes in which 
heredity in all its countless backward reaches makes itself felt 
in the soul. After a musical ecstasy with its illuminating and 
thrilling vitalization, its play upon every part and physiolog- 
ical function, its exquisite mental inebriation, its essential and 
transcendental discipline, how our ideas of man's soul are 
vastated, how pitifully narrow and inadequate our psychologies 
seem, and how zealous should be our advocacy of a pedagogy 
that shall guarantee to every soul, especially during adoles- 
cence, when it is most susceptible, adequate exposure to this 
art that has in it more promise and potency than any other 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 95 

kind of culture, that is without exception of quintessential, 
liberal, humanistic, educational value ! To me it seems that 
no art is in recent years growing quite so fast or showing so 
many bold new departures, is making more progress in get- 
ting close to life, finding more new resources, and that in none 
does teaching lag so far behind what it could and should do 
for the development of the human soul. 

But does music pay ? To the mucker, Philistine, or to the 
pedagogue, no ; less than anything else. For most there is no 
money in it, and for nearly all the few who will teach, or even 
perform, but very little. It is hard to examine in music save 
in mere note reading. Young children do not under present 
methods feel it much, and older ones do not know that they 
do. All its best, most edifying and preforming effects are 
very far beyond the reach of all our tests. So the music teach- 
ers must cast bread on the waters, sow seed they will never 
see ripen, walk and work by faith and not by sight, and are 
by the very psychological nature of the subject always de- 
prived in very large measure of the fruition that is the true 
teacher's best reward. Would that they might realize more 
of what the psychogenetecist now sees of the pedagogic effi- 
cacy of music, and be heartened by his new and growing re- 
spect for their work ! Would even that they might hear more 
and oftener the best music so as to be led captive with utter 
abandon to its charm, and thus become more idealistic and 
learn more respect for their own vocation ! They should 
learn to describe to pubescents occasionally in words what 
music means to those who^ love it, interest them a little in the 
lives of the great composers, performers, and singers, tell their 
classes with what travail of soul some of the great master- 
pieces were created, how historic virtuosos have entranced vast 
audiences. They should make all their pupils understand what 
spells have been cast and what raptures have been brought, 
what battles music has won upon bloody fields, what patriotic 
movements it has expressed and helped create, etc. The very 
history of some of the great national airs is itself an inspira- 
tion. By these simple melodies and words countless men and 
women have died, soothed and sustained to the very brink of 
the grave. Here is a little group of songs that have saved 
many a soul from sin, have led wanderers and prodigals home ; 



96 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

here are some that have comforted thousands of mourners 
whom death has bereaved. What class would not sing the 
Marseillaise hymn vastly better after having been told a little 
of its history and learning, e. g., how the Girondists sang it 
together as they went to death one after another, the chorus 
growing fainter but the air sustained till the last head fell un- 
der the guillotine? Thoughout the South to-day it is not the 
voice as much as the heart that sings " Dixie," because that is 
a melody that is vital and not desiccated. Music in schools 
should palpitate with the emotional life in which the best of it 
was born. It should be set in its matrix of historic meaning, 
or it is a cold and clammy thing. Children should not be 
asked to sing unless they feel. Without emotion music is de- 
natured, and its substance is sacrificed to its form. With each 
vital selection, therefore, should go the story, if it have one, 
and those songs that have stories should be always preferred. 
Music can express the soul of great men, epochs, events, races. 
These can live, move, and have their being in music, which is 
thus in some sense the very soul of history, especially culture 
history. It should be given this setting for children. The 
sentiment of the period and the personality of the author of 
" The Battle Hymn of the Republic," " Die Wacht am 
Rhein," " Rule Britannia," etc., should be made to glow in 
the juvenile soul beforehand by vividly and carefully prepared 
description and story. Musicians should be full of patriotic, 
not to say military, spirit, and national dance music should, 
if possible, always be illustrated somehow with the steps and 
postures that go with it ; and even love songs should be set in 
definite circumstance and romance to the imagination, and, if 
used, should be made to elevate, long-circuit, and idealize 
rather than to sensualize the tender passion. School music 
usually lacks all this, and that is why much of it is a ghastly 
relic made up of technic, intellect, and voice culture, from 
all of which the soul has gone. Nowhere has the logical been 
so oblivious of, or opposed to, the genetic pedag-ogic order. 
Current methods are worse than teaching the child natural 
history from a few dried plants or stuffed beasts and birds. 
I honor the very indifference of the average child to its music 
lesson, because this is its own mute protest against a monstrous 
thing. The music teacher should have unusual range and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 97 

strength of emotions, and should never require pupils to sing- 
what or when they do not strongly feel. 

As we are here concerned with education we must pass 
very slightly over the tempting field of music in the insect, 
animal, and even the bird world, which is so important for 
the psychogenesis of the art. I cannot conceive how any can 
doubt that lower creatures truly sing, and that in the most 
vital sense of the art. 

H. W. Oldys 1 thinks that in both birds and man vocal utter- 
ances began with simple ejaculations and slowly developed increas- 
ing concatenation. Some birds have beautiful voices and great skill 
in using them, while others with less power of brilliant execution 
have songs that rank higher as musical compositions. Repetition of 
single notes or phrases, and combinations and variations of inter- 
vals are common. Most writers doubt whether birds have any sense 
of our melodic scale. Some except the cuckoo, wren, song sparrow, 
woodthrush, chewink, robin, and so on. They are certainly often 
close to our notes. Concerts and duets this author thinks he has 
observed and describes. There are sometimes repetitions so that the 
same esthetic rules appear. Some birds, it is well known, can pro- 
duce human melodies. 

The gong-beat method of the Sarawak Malays is very complicated. 
Their orchestra usually consists first of several small gongs on a 
bamboo framework, a larger gong, two small drums, and a still 
larger gong, the tazvakr The three first keep excellent time, the 
third emitting a high note irregularly, accenting the first of every 
four sounds. The tawak has what seems a totally independent 
rhythm. It is beaten in various modes, all of which seem to be 
marked by the absence of time, the beats recurring with incom- 
prehensible irregularity. Yet, when an expert passed his instrument 
to another, the novice was derided, showing that only an expert 
could play it. This rhythm is accompanied by no movement or song. 
Its beats are damped with the left hand, and sometimes the body 
and sometimes the central boss is struck. By these differences this 
instrument carries news of death, war, and childbirth, each mode 
of beating having a recognized meaning. Myers had a Malay tap 
upon a Morse key as if he were beating the tawak and registered 
the time. He found there were many different methods at first, 
his time figures seemed very irregular. He finally concluded, how- 
ever, that one series of beats was grouped in two alternately recur- 

^ Parallel Growth of Bird and Human Music. Harper's Magazine, 1902, vol. 
105, PP- 474-478. 

^ Charles S. Myers: A Study of Rhythm in Primitive Music, Journal of Psychol- 
ogy, 1905, vol. 1, pp. 397-406. 
8 



98 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ring bars of different lengths, one of them comprising seven and 
five tenths units or tenths of seconds, and the other five units. The 
beats within the latter bar are always two in number and have the 
values of two and three. Those in the former bar may be two or 
three in number, and with any one of four different values. The 
alternations of such measures would not be appreciated by the Euro- 
pean ear. In two of the methods the beats, separated by intervals 
of different lengths, are gathered into distinct groups, each divided 
from the neighboring groups by one or more beats, one closing with 
a succession of very rapid and the other with very slow beats. His 
studies convinced the author that these Malays can regard many 
successively different intervals of time as a coordinated whole which 
they recognize when repeated in the course of a performance. This 
faculty they carry to a degree which lies so far beyond the power 
of civilized musicians that the latter may reasonably be skeptical as 
to the possibility of its occurrence among less advanced people. But 
corroboration has been found by Day, who gives a table of some 
forty rhythmic periods of early Indian music, each having its own 
name and mark of notation. Day, however, found it hard to be- 
lieve that such complex periods were ever in very common use. 
There is, however, no doubt that the early Indians, like the Malays, 
enjoyed the faculty of combining successive dissimilar periods and 
of regarding them as members of a complex unity. The rhythms 
of the ancient Greeks and Arabs were scarcely less complex. The 
pseonic and hemiolic rhythms of the Greeks are remarkably founded 
on the ratio 3 : 2. Each of the five beats some think could be sub- 
divided into five, so that the foot might contain the ratios of 15:10, 
the precise ratio of one method of tawak beating. The poetic 
meters were probably overlain by musical rhythms just as the tawak 
accompanies the gong and drum orchestra. It is pretty well made 
out that the complexities of the Greek lyric meter are due to over- 
lapping of rhythms. One writer ascribes their aesthetic value to an 
effect resembling counterpoint in music. Fillmore says of the 
Omahas, " I know of no greater rhythmical difficulties anywhere 
in our modern music than these Omahas have completely at com- 
mand in their everyday music. . . . Rhythm is by far the most 
elaborately developed element of Indian music." The feeling for 
rhythm is highly developed among the Japanese, even the most diffi- 
cult syncopations being performed with a precision that would as- 
tonish a European musician. It has been found also in Siamese 
and Javanese music. Sometimes syncopation and change of rhythm 
are so frequent that we are unable to detect any constant primary 
rhythm at all. Others have emphasized the ability of the American 
Indian and the East Indian to perform five- and seven-pulse measures. 
The traits of primitive music, therefore, are a delight in change and 
opposition of rhythm and a demand that relatively long periods filled 
with measures of diverse length be apprehended as an organic whole 
or phrase. With us musical progress has been by the elaboration of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 99 

harmony rather than of rhythm. With the advance of choral sing- 
ing a more regular and frequent accent was necessary than in prim- 
itive music, which is unhampered by the demands of harmony and 
polyphony and which has therefore evolved complications of succes- 
sion rather than of simultaneity, of measure than of tone. In early 
mediaeval music we find irregularities and often defects of rhythm, 
and in recent times composers often obtained novel and striking ef- 
fects by departures from uniform conventional rhythm. Whether 
they will reattain or adopt such complex rhythms as are found 
among certain primitive people will in part depend upon gradual 
education of the audience and in part on " the limiting value of the 
strain of attention which is compatible with sesthetic pleasure." 

A poet and musician,^ who is perhaps better known as an author 
of novels, observed that his own children, reared in a musical at- 
mosphere, in their dreamy moods, crooned melodic snatches which 
were utterances of sheer emotion. The drawings of the child are 
very whimsical oddities. Its sayings come rather nearer expressing 
his true self. But the true evolution of the child's soul from within 
is found in song. When twenty-eight months old, the author's boy 
composed and sang a very simple phrase to the words, " I saw the 
pussy in granny's window." At three, a longer tune was uncon- 
sciously invented to the words, several times repeated, " Oh, the sun 
is on the bath and the birdies are building nests in the trees." Var- 
ious others express a dreamy kind of wandering in more or less 
accented notes. The second boy, at seventeen months, uttered a 
distinctly musical call, imitated a trumpet and showed a distinct 
sense for key, with leanings toward plagal cadences. The second 
child is quite as musical as the first but less prone to dreamy solilo- 
quies. Some of these songs show tonality; others are in very 
marked cantabile style. Occasionally the words are gibberish. The 
real minor is rare. The spontaneous music of these children was 
easily more in tune than music that they had learned. The author 
believes that canon, instead of being a late refinement of musical 
art, IS one of its earliest developments, and is led to this view by 
observations on his own children. By rolling sheets of paper like 
trumpets the children would improvise in unison, the elder leading 
and the other following so promptly and truly that it was difficult 
to tell which was the leader. So when the father invented tunes, 
the children followed with startling ease, as though all three were 
inventing the same thing at once. If the scale is not natural, it is 
certainly imbibed very early, although when very young children 
are set to learn even simple little melodies, they lose tune at once. 
The author's view is that by centuries of culture and experience we 

' Child Music. A study of tunes made up by quite young children, with very 
striking examples and illustrative remarks, concluding with elaborate pieces founded 
entirely upon young children's tunes. By William Piatt. Simpkin, Marshall & 
Co., London, 1905, 37 p. 



lOO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

have discovered a scale at harmony with natural law which is quickly- 
assimilated. In the history of the race, the plagal cadence is earlier, 
and children redevelop it for themselves; but in the history of con- 
certed music, canon is an early feature, and this children rediscover. 
The tunes of the more resolute younger boy more often ended on 
the keynote. Finally, the author has taken these simple tunelets, in- 
tact and exactly as they were invented, as themes for rather elabo- 
rate compositions of his own, often adding, however, new verses, 
but adhering closely to the thematic material of the children. One 
child persistently avoided strong accents. 

O. Koerte ^ has experimented at length upon his seven children 
by teaching them music at home and reaches the conclusion that 
the ethical movement, which many artists think should be neglected 
for the technical side, should be supreme. He regrets that the 
copious resources of music are not brought to bear effectively, as. 
they should, upon either the masses or the young. Most live either 
without music or with bad music. Education to music and through 
music are parallel and mutually determining norms. He accepts 
Billroth's answer to the question, Who is musical? and doubts wheth- 
er all have by nature even the capacity for rhythm, which is a far 
more complex thing than mere time and measure. He would begin 
at least with children not later than five, and lays great stress upon 
imitation. At first he would not entirely exclude humor, but the 
basis of all such practice should be folk songs and child songs with 
simple tonality such as is seen in the chorals. Good music can be 
repeated and made ever new by light dynamic and rhythmic shad- 
ings and variations. Harmony, such as a piano can supply, greatly 
supports the appreciation of not only music but even melody and 
intervals in the child; but accompaniments must be played very 
lightly. The task not only increases interest but makes the innova- 
tion of the tone easier. Immediate following of tones eye to eye is 
itself a valuable discipline. The higher tones are more likely to cause 
detonative singing. He would practically forbid all singing of scales, 
and, of course, gives the major scales temporal, as they also have 
historic, precedence. Even those with poor voices should sing.^ Now 
that we know the limits between the highest and the lowest notes 
which the average child sings with ease, we can regulate our work 
accordingly. Pronunciation should be natural, and not through the 
teeth or nose, as so many are prone to sing. So in respiration we 
should be careful not to depart far from nature. All instrumentation 
rests on somewhat insecure foundations if not based upon singing. 

A. Koenig ^ says that children should early learn to combine tones 

* Gedanken und Erfahrungen liber musikalische Erziehung. Zeitschrift fiir 
padagogische Psychologie. Berlin, 1902, vol. 4, p. 11-38. 

^ See my Adolescence, vol. 2, p. 27 et seq. 

3 Die Entwicklung des musikalischen Sinnes bei Kindern. Die Kinderfehler, 
1903, vol. 8, pp. 49-61, 97-110. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC loi 

in melody, and can do so with the same degree of creativeness that 
they can mold sand. Prayer's child was quieted by music at the 
ao-e of six weeks. Striimpell found a child who was interested in the 
piano at the age of twelve weeks. Rhythm comes very early. Preyer 
observed tact movements at eighteen months. Mystics have thought 
that a child might hear " divine sighs in the air which it breathes." 
Of course the music must be very simple and not polyphonous. The 
child does not understand beauty of musical form any more than 
it can understand the form of poetry. Sense for the spiritual ele- 
ment of music does not occur in children. Triiper thinks one 
third of the children hardly hear normally. So does Monroe. The 
May of life blooms but once and soon passes. Perhaps the inner 
soul of music is most felt by man, and woman is more receptive. 
In complex rhythms girls are more helpless than boys. Heredity is 
uncertain. Some have said that children do not sing of their own 
motive, that wordless humming occurs only by adults, that children 
only use words; but others think children perceive music before 
they can learn words. Simmel, speaking of yodeling, thinks music 
is connected with sex. According to Groos, primitive music is con- 
nected with war. Speech and music give to hearing its first signifi- 
cance and lift man into the psychic sphere. Perhaps in training 
numbers we must aim only at mediocrity. Musical memory is little 
used. Koenig proposes an elaborate questionnaire to ascertain cer- 
tain facts about the early development of music and rhythm. 

Miss Hofer ^ says self-activity, spontaneity, self-expression, play, 
spirit, must be the watchwords in music as in all other things, and 
inceptive work, which recognizes native impulses, needs more at- 
tention. Unmusical teachers do great injury. The end of all train- 
ing which aims at ear-mindedness must be to arouse the conscious- 
ness for voice, tone, inflection, tempo, and to develop musical 
consciousness by increased capacity for hearing and appreciating 
tone. This is greatly aided by using the voice. People who cannot 
sing have been neglected at this nascent period. Language should 
be more inflected and not hurried or chattered. Song should be 
musical conversation, and speech, music, and language should blend. 
Musical good mornings and perhaps simple original creations with 
imitative songs, help the child to appreciate the music of nature, 
which is very important. The child can understand what occurs 
to the ear and mind, long before it can produce. Music ought to be 
a means of communicating ideas. 

W. S. Monroe ^ found that young children give to musical sounds 
degrees of sustained attention quite out of proportion to the normal 
control of their activities, and often learn to sing before they can 

^ Educational Use of Music for Children under the Age of Seven. Ad. and 
Proc, N. E. A., 1900, pp. 397-402. 

2 Tone Perception and Music Interests of Young Children. Ped. Sem., 1903, 
vol. ID, pp. 144-146. 



I02 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

talk. Rhythmic measures of tonal kinds very early cause pleasure 
and pain. From data concerning i6i children under six, he found 
that 29 of the boys and 49 of the girls could be taught to sing the 
scale. From four to five years, 34 per cent of the boys and 59 per 
cent of the girls could learn it. At six the proportions were boys 
41 per cent, girls 71 per cent. Some could learn only a portion of 
the scale, difficulties with the upper notes being greatest. Some are 
limited in the perception of high tones. Children were also taught 
to sing simple songs and a fortnight later to reproduce them, which 
50 per cent of the girls and 63 per cent of the boys did. The memory 
of songs exceeds that of scales, although it is more complex. This 
is due perhaps to rhythm and to association with the concrete sub- 
jects of such songs; 27 per cent of the boys and 59 per cent of the 
girls seemed to have special tastes for music, the male curve drop- 
ping as age advances, while girls' interest rises. Zufall found 
auditory defects 20 per cent more common among males than fe- 
males in Germany, and D'Espine, in France, found deafness 22 per 
cent more common among men than women. In the private schools 
for the deaf in this country there are 10 per cent more boys than 
girls. Jastrow and Morehaus showed that women students' hearing 
is more acute than that of men. All this indicates feminine superior- 
ity in tone perception and musical interest, although women have 
done little in musical composition. 

Alice B. Gomme has collected and edited ancient movement songs 
from English children and prints them with copious annotations, 
music and illustrations, in an interesting series. ^ Most of these con- 
sist three-fourths or more of repetitions, or perhaps the successive 
verses have only one word different in each. But there is a great deal 
of movement and rhythm, and otherwise much imaginative and mimic 
action — milking, riding, weeping, dancing, dandling babies, wash- 
ing, ceremonious salutes, ancient rural games, often with intense 
emotional coloring, drinking, murdering, loving, and death. There 
could hardly be a greater disparity between these and the more 
recently made games and plays for, of, and by, children. 

Charles E. Keyes, West Brookfield, Massachusetts, has for 
several years studied and recorded the progress made in musical 
education. He usually taught from thirty to fifty rote songs each 
year, beginning with thirty in the first and reaching fifty in the 
third grade. In rote work the child follows a good form of music 
far better than the jangle usually taught. Words in music are the 
chief difficulty ; if they are too old there is trouble. In songs about 
animals, trees, devotion, nature, patriotism, motion, children are at 
home. Absolute pitch is of no account. A little work cures all 
those who first sing in monotone. One boy learned to sing correctly 
holding his music upside down. At the sixth grade, too, practical 
music sense is well established. Sometimes the nasty and most 

' Children's Singing Games. Nutt: London, 1894, 70 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 



103 



noisy little rowdies prefer the softest and sweetest songs. Boys 
who have not been taught to read music usually lack interest in it. 
From a vast number of tests made Mr. Keyes found that of 28,225 
who sang, 74 persons sang correctly. This difference was far less 
between boys and girls than had been supposed. Boys and girls 
usually prefer the music to the words. Individual methods are 
specially commended. Mr. Keyes's exhibits show great progress. In 
the third grade the first test in individual singing showed that out 
of 235 pupils only 45 failed. In another exhibit out of 375 only 37 
failed. This, so far as I know, is an unparalleled record. The test 
was confined to the ability to read and sing music at sight alone. 
In the choice of songs the ethical led, then came those of patriotism, 
nature songs in a minor key, and the seasons. 

J. A. Gilbert ^ experimented on the comparative power of dis- 
crimination between notes by the method of minimal gradation. 
Each experiment was composed of two tones and a judgment as to 
their likeness. The tone varied from was A (equals 435 vibrations 
of the international pitch). The variations were in 32nds of a full 
tone. First A was sounded, then one, two, and higher, until the 
child several times decided that the second tone was different, ten 
experiments being made on each 
child with a tone tester. Five 
boys and girls of each age from 
six to nineteen were thus tested. 
The results are shown in the fol- 
lowing table, where the figures 
on the horizontal axis indicate 
ages and those in the vertical 
column represent the number of 
32nds of a tone required to 
produce the sensation of differ- 
ence. We thus see at first the 
rapid increase of discriminative 
power from some twelve to five 
32nds of a note between six and 
nine years of age, and from that 
age to nineteen there is a total 
improvement of only two 32nds 

of a note, with years of deterioration culminating at ten and fifteen, 
due perhaps to teething and puberty respectively. 

Only three needed more than half a tone. This increase was 
very great until nine, and then to ten there was a rather marked 
remission, and another from about fourteen to fifteen. With these 
exceptions the curve is rather smooth and asymptotic. To verify 
the expansions at ten and fifteen, tests were made on other children, 



COMPARATIVE 
NOTES BV 


POWER OF DISCRIMINATION BETWEEN 
VIETHOD OF MINIMAL GRADATION. 




























y 


























\ 


























\ 




























\ 


























\ 


























\ 


V 


























\ 


/ 


\^ 






















\ 




N 


\ 






/ 


\ 




















^ 


-.^ 


/ 




N 




























'\ 


-— 






































-J 

















10 11 1.2 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 



^ Experiments on the Musical Sensitiveness of School Children. Studies from 
the Yale Psychological Laboratory, 1892, vol. i, pp. 80-87. 



I04 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

but this general result remained. A similar period of augmentation 
appears to have occurred at twenty, after which it drops again as 
before. 

A very interesting study was made by Fanny B. Gates. ^ Two 
thousand papers from one hundred boys and girls of each age 
from seven and under to sixteen and over, as to their favorite songs 
were collected and classified. The largest class was social, includ- 
ing folk, negro, home, school, and love. Under seven these were 
often lullabies. Home songs gradually dechne up the grades. 
School songs, beginning with 43 per cent each at seven years, fell to 
two per cent in girls and five per cent in boys at sixteen. Negro 
melodies were twice as often favorite with boys as with girls. Re- 
ligious songs increased in general up the grades. Patriotic songs 
attained their maximum of 29 per cent with girls at twelve, and 40 
per cent with boys at fifteen. The choice of songs on account of 
words in general decreases with age, and music comes to the fore. 
Rhythm begins as a dual balance, and in its simpler forms is always 
based upon two. Perhaps if we had three arms and legs triple 
measure would predominate. In recalling music rhythm often comes 
first. It gives a sense of movement. Very young children sometimes 
have strong favorites because of the lilt. The bushman sings in his 
dance till exhausted, and from this grows the symphony. Chorley 
says national music was derived from dances. Patriotic music was 
chosen by 18 per cent of the boys and 17 per cent of the girls, boys 
being most interested in history. Among the Sandwich Islanders 
their history is preserved in song. This is true in Greenland and in 
Africa, -where wandering minstrels glorified the chief. Spencer says 
national airs are affected by the intonations of speech. This seems 
true of Italy and Scotland; but some savages have pleasant language 
but rude music. Association with special scenes frequently deter- 
mines the choice. Gurney denies association except as a merely in- 
tellectual process. Some are almost visionary and some always think 
of motion in connection with their favorite songs. Some have chills 
and shudders, stand on tiptoe, etc. Mendelssohn said that music 
expresses things too definite for words. Words mean different 
things for different persons, but song can awake only the same feel- 
ing in all. Music exists only inside the subject. Galton found a 
great falling off in the power of hearing high notes with age. 
Small dogs could hear high notes; large ones could not. Cats ex- 
celled in this. Binet found twelve per cent had colored hearing. 

Children often prefer certain keys and rarely minor ones. In 
southern Mexico the jolly songs of the natives are sad, and their 
merry ones seem to us melancholy. Australian music chimes in 
with the words. The rudest forms have some scale. At first, in- 
tervals less than one tone were avoided. In the Stone Age instru- 

^ Musical Interests of Children. Journal of Pedagogy, Oct., 1898, vol. 11, pp. 
265-284. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 105 

ments corresponded to part of our diatonic scale. Engel thinks the 
pentatonic scale easiest for children. Waterhouse found a gibbon 
singing the chromatic scale, and another writer found a bird that 
sang down eight to twelve true notes. Cheney says bird music has 
the same intervals and uses major and minor keys. He believes that 
with a good ear and equal chance, two persons, no matter how far 
apart, would develop similar taste and perception for music. This 
is pedagogically significant. Reisman thinks folk songs best for 
children. Music should fit the mood. We should not teach spring 
songs in the fall. Becker, of Berlin, says the child on leaving 
school should know thirty songs and one hundred chorals by heart, 
and this is better for most than all the power to read music which 
the school can give. Notes should come in the middle of the gram- 
mar course, but singing first. Home, school, church, state, nation, 
can be thus trained. 

In Asia few traces of original music can be found. One writer 
says ancient Indian music has been lost save a few pastorals. Mo- 
hammed thought music a device of the devil to ruin man. Liszt says 
all Hungarian national music is pure gypsy, or borrowed, or stolen. 
Another thinks the law of accent is the same in Hungarian music 
and language, and opposed to that of the gypsy language. Our 
Indians are very musical. Among the Damaras in South Africa the 
highest ideal is to imitate galloping horses. Rhythm predominates 
over melody, and music is associated with intense exercise. The 
Papuans have a kind of Meistersinger school. Certain songs can be 
sung only by those of certain rank, and physicians attend their 
patients to the accompaniment of music. Convalescents must sing 
several hours a day. In many primitive people the male voice is 
high. Berg thinks it was so in primitive man and low voices are a 
late development. Wallaschek doubts this, for savages would have 
had female voices since boys' voices fall. But he attributes high 
pitch to excitement. 

Darwin thinks music and rhythm originated as a sex charm. It 
excites tenderness, ardor, war. Spencer derives it from emotional 
speech. It awakens dormant sentiments of which we had not con- 
ceived the possibility and do not know the meaning. They appear 
like mental reversions to the emotions and thoughts of a long passed 
age. Perhaps the power of music has been sublimated out of coarse 
excitements to higher emotions which we can no longer explain. 
Wallaschek dissents from Darwin and Spencer that music grew out 
of speech or that the original music was love song transmuted. He 
says only music can tell what it expresses. Hudson says the song 
of the male birds on La Plata during the pairing season is feeble 
and sketchy, interspersed with love antics ; but only after the mate 
is chosen are songs melodious. Hence he thinks that conscious 
sexual selection on the part of the female is not the cause of music 
and dancing performances of the males, nor of the bright colors and 
ornaments that distinguish him. Wallaschek thinks there is no 



io6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

speech in songs. It arises purely from the rhythmic impulse. Time 
preceded melody. Music expressed emotions and stands to speech 
as drawing to writing. Gurney thinks the vocal expression of a 
particular emotion came first and then followed vocal expression in 
general. The vital element in emotion is its idealized rendering. 
This Sully denies, claiming that melody is the essential part of music 
and is a fusion of rhythm and pitch. Music rather than poetry is 
the happy art. " It gives to children nothing but heaven." 

As to reasons for their choices, children in the Gates study were 
usually unable to express themselves except by saying because it was 
sweet, lively, fast, sad, etc. The sense of rhythm was very promi- 
nent. The swing and lilt and possibility of using the music as a 
dance was often expressed. Older children dealt often with patriotic 
reasons. This suggests how primitive people often develop tradi- 
tions based upon history which are preserved in song, and chant the 
deeds of their ancestors, or how wandering minstrels glorify their 
chief. Association was one of the most interesting reasons of pref- 
erence. The whip-poor-will suggests a country home. A southern 
song revives familiar scenes by those whose early home was in the 
south. Other songs suggest the hills, sea, flowers, birds, bells, 
winter, midsummer. Several specified that in different moods they 
enjoyed different songs. 

In this study a number of interesting ca^es of colored audition 
were found. Vowels have most color, while consonants are faded. 
A is usually red. One lady saw green when she heard Haydn, blue 
when she heard Mozart, yellow on hearing Chopin, etc. When she 
hears an oboe she sees a white pyramid ; on hearing a 'cello or a 
trumpet, sees a flat, undulating ribbon of white fibers ; in an orchestra 
when the violins strike up she sees a shower of white dust. Some see 
mosaics. Only a few prefer minor songs or have preference for keys. 

E. L. Norton ^ says music must conform to the actual present in- 
terests of the child and to the potential adult. The best songs are 
those in which most are interested and whose effects last longest. 
One function is to unite child and adult and not sever them. The 
earlier songs should be simple, not complex, possibly on the five- 
note scale, with bright tempo, allegro rather than adagio, the two- 
rhythm rather than the three-rhythm, closely related to life, etc. 
There are humorous songs like those of Taubert that are refined and 
classic. Perhaps no rhythm is bad in itself, although some arouse 
and others soothe and intoxicate. The two-step rhythm arouses 
animal spirits, puts vitality into motor play and subdues everything to 
its own form. Good music may be adapted to children's needs if this 
is skillfully done. Old music, hymns, ballads, lyrics, and love songs, 
if connected with religious sentiment, as, for instance, bywords, are 
to be commended. 

' The Selection of School Songs. Elementary School Teacher, 1904, vol. 5, pp. 
148-158. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 107 

E. K. Fairweather ^ holds that music is the chief expression and 
method of training- of the heart and all the sentiments and emotions. 
The lack of it makes men desiccated and unhearty and, though they 
may be smart, leaves their emotional life shallow and dry. If the 
feelings languish the imagination does so. Music teaches by con- 
tagion and like poetry "lifts the veil from the hidden beauty of the 
world." It keeps the soul in relation to the deepest realities and 
gives a medium for expressing what is felt. Perhaps the fundamen- 
tal trouble in teaching music to children is the lack of appreciation 
of rhythm. Harmony is akin to law. The author thinks children 
might attempt little musical compositions of their own as a mode of 
development and expression. Busy hours take care of themselves 
but we should chiefly be anxious for the child's leisure time. We 
greatly lack healthy and innocent recreation. As a universal lan- 
guage music transcends all differences of age and culture and makes 
for social unity. Never has the world needed music so much as to- 
day. It is a moral law and gives the soul over to the universe, the 
ideal of order, and suggests the invisible. 

Max Meyer" thinks the chief object of musical training should 
be to make the pupils enjoy music rather than to read notes or sing 
and play. It is often hard to understand a complex musical pro- 
duction like a sonata, and he advises the aid of visual sensations, 
and especially approves Hovker's scheme. His pictures are used at 
the first instruction to call the pupil's attention to the fact that every 
song is composed of partial tunes or phrases, each of which is rep- 
resented by a figure. These pictures, however, help far more in help- 
ing to understand coexistence than they do succession. Very young 
pupils can thus associate figures with tunes.^ As a result of much 
experience and labor, he has devised a graphic scheme of presenting 
music, particularly fugues and sonatas, to the eye. For this purpose 
he dispenses with all but the heads of notes and connects these by 
lines, omitting all time signs, and carrying the chief theme in a form 
picture. He often, too, dispenses with one, two, or three lines of the 
staff, so that his scheme slightly suggests the holes in a pianola roll 
connected with lines. By supplementing this method with colored dots 
and lines and by the occasional use of small circles, it is possible to 
represent one, or, indeed, a number of parts and instruments in an 
orchestra. Verbal explanations appended show the leading motive, 
subordinate phrases, elaborations, and the various other divisions. 
By this means those who do not read music, it is claimed, are able to 
follow it more intelligently and to recall the chief motives. Their 

' Psychological and Ethical Value of Music. Adr. and Proc. of the N. E. A. 
1902, pp. 621-625. 

2 How a Musical Education Should be Acquired in the Public School. Peda- 
gogical Seminary, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 124-131. 

* Die graphische Darstellung als Mittel der Erziehung zum musikalischen 
Horen, von Robert Hovker. Otto Schuize, Gothen, 1899, 31 p. 



io8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

attention is called to symmetry, opposition, reversal, and other 
aesthetic elements, and particularly for those eye-minded, and also 
for those who desire assistance in penetrating the mysteries of mu- 
sical theory, it may be of assistance. It is urged, too, that young 
children by this method are able to apperceive and intelligently 
appreciate a much more refined and advanced kind of music than 
would otherwise be possible. Of course no one can judge the merits 
of such a scheme without considerable observation of its actual 
working in practice. It has, however, interesting suggestions for 
the psychologist. 

J. Courtier ^ tested musical, which had nothing to do with acous- 
tic, memory. There were nine association types between hearing, 
sight, word, feeling, motion. These conservatory pupils showed that 
a good musical memory demanded not only sharp correct musical 
hearing, but also a good voice. Those with good tones and memory 
were often weak in rhythm. Most could reproduce pitch and 
accuracy, others were weak in it and also in intervals, which they 
could not evaluate. It is hard to tell whether in these reproductions 
hearing or motor concepts or both were effective. 

Kratz ^ had three selections of very different character played 
and asked high-school pupils to note and later to write down the im- 
pressions each piece gave, and to give it an appropriate title. One 
represented the mad pranks of the harlequin and was rightly inter- 
preted by a great number. A cradle song was most difficult, per- 
haps because the sentiments were not adequately conveyed by the 
composer. To meditate, muse, be soothed, and hear a lullaby, opens 
the heart to many emotions. Girls had more natural views on music 
and understood their inner selves and discriminated more closely in 
their attempts to portray feeling than did boys. A wide range of 
both sensations and emotions was aroused, such as the impulse to 
dance, feeling nervous thrills, muscles twitching, happy moods, desire 
to run a race, do a great deed. Many could not express the im- 
pressions aroused by the music. Perhaps much, normally too deep 
for words, can be uttered by practice. At any rate, it helps us to 
become acquainted with emotions, longings, yearnings, that are too 
deep for words, and thus may aid us to shape our characters more 
intelligently. 

Gaiffe ^ holds that the end of musical instruction is first to 
educate a very small number of musicians well; and secondly, to 
so train a large number that they can hear and enjoy the great 
masterpieces of music. 

"^ Communication sur la memoire Musicale. Ill Internat. Congress f. Psychol. 
Miinchen, 1897, pp. 238-240. 

^ Study in Musical Interpretation. Adr. and Proc. of the N. E. A., 1900, pp. 

590-591- 

3 F. Gaiffe: La Musique a I'Ecole. In L'Educateur Moderne, July, 1909, 
vol. 4, pp. 308-318. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 109 

The data collected on the effects of barbaric music on civ- 
ilized children are unsatisfactory. Many children have heard 
Chinese, Indian, and other crude music at exhibitions, etc. 
Some think it a joke and very laughable, some are simply 
bored ; to others it is unpleasant or even distressing. To some 
it is monotonous, and makes them sleepy; a few love it all 
very much. And some feel, as a high-school girl expressed it, 
that they would like to *' shake off the dust of civilization and 
get back to nature and be at home." Mr. Farwell's harmo- 
nized and adapted Indian music, which is perhaps less " sophis- 
ticated with culture than Longfellow's ' Hiawatha,' " he re- 
ports as pleasing to children ; and Natalie Curtis's singing of 
the Indian songs noted in her fascinating " Indian Book," 
which is far more aboriginal, is as charming to hear as Alice 
Fletcher's Sioux songs or Cushing's Zuni melodies, if such 
they can be called, are to read. All this has a charming nov- 
elty, and excites curiosity in old and young. Savage music 
differs very widely in both kind and degree of development. 
From rhythmic noises to music which follows laws that even 
seem to us as much more complicated than those that underlie 
modern music as the grammar of savage tongues seems more 
intricate than that of English, is a long way. Even a slight 
degree of musical culture on the part of the child tends to 
make primitive music seem stranger than it otherwise would. 
If we could grade the latter from lowest to highest along the 
genuine phyletic scale of development and expose an untutored 
modern child to its stages, we should then, and only then, be 
able to answer the question how crude native music affects 
our children. Till then this rapport between ontogeny and 
phylogeny must be left in abeyance. Approximative data could 
now doubtless be collected that would give valuable cues and 
suggestions. Meanwhile my own impression is that there are 
rudiments in the child's soul that will respond to, and could 
best be developed by, some of the crude elemental music, when 
w^e really know what is most typical of it, and what age it 
fits best, and that even old folk songs, and far more the usually 
babyfied music in our first courses, now force the child to skip 
an important stage in its indigenous musical evolution which 
could be made good use of, and the present expression of which 
is a lost chord between the child and the race which we should 



no EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

seek to restore in the interests of humanistic musical culture. 
Present methods isolate music too early from its broad nour- 
ishing basis of rhythmic movement, action, cadenced inflection, 
and feeling generally, and make it an independent cult, spe- 
cialized and, worst of all, technical, before it has performed 
the supreme function of its nascent state in cultivating the 
emotional life, and, if not creating, at least conserving impor- 
tant factors of it. 

Music in the modern sense is one of the hardest and latest 
as well as one of the most intricate products of human culture, 
and this fact must be invoked in addition to lack of training 
in order to understand why we find children at every stage 
of undevelopment and arrest, from amusia and musical idiocy 
up. Our returns abound in cases like the following : a bright, 
witty, but cold, selfish girl of fourteen cannot sing at all, and 
has no idea of pitch ; a bright boy of sixteen never sang or 
whistled; an only child of twelve with peculiar ear defect 
seems unable to tell one note from another ; a boy of fourteen 
could not sing at all, and apparently had little idea of what 
music was, but by diligent training sang fairly well at sixteen ; 
a boy of seventeen persistently sang in monotones, singing 
louder where he should sing higher in pitch, but had a fair 
sense of time; a boy of fifteen sang up and down the scale 
when others singing with him did, but varied four or five 
notes only, so that, where there were high notes, he sang sev- 
eral tones too low and vice versa. Music is painfully exciting 
to some, who are made cross by it. Some distinguish tunes 
of similar character, like church tunes, chiefly or only by 
words ; otherwise all tunes are alike to them. Some are essen- 
tially indifferent to or are bored by music. Frequently young 
children can be taught to keep time only with difficulty and 
cannot march with others, or can do so only by rocking their 
whole body, watching the step of their mates, and fixing their 
whole attention on it. Very many more have but languid in- 
terest in music, and hardly ever any feeling or appreciation for 
it, although doing the school work fairly well. These are sam- 
ples of many cases reported by teachers of music in schools. 
More study of such cases is greatly to be desired both for 
science and for pedagogy. While some of these children are 
exceptionally bright in other things in a way that suggests 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC m 

compensation, it would seem that most have either some 
auditory, vocal, motor, or mental defect, or that they are espe- 
cially prone to be deficient in sentiment, heart, and especially 
in the capacities of keen social sympathy with others. Some 
of them having heard very little music, and never having sung, 
simply lack training, but there is no ground for asserting that 
no child would sing if it had never heard others do so, nor is 
there for denying this statement. Many asseverations of en- 
thusiastic teachers to the contrary, there are no doubt con- 
genital musical diverts and even imbeciles. Would savage 
music appeal to such children, and are they simply lingering 
in some paleopsychic stage? Is the slight progress they are 
capable of making worth what it costs ? Above all, we would 
like to know what other psychic effects usually accompany this, 
and what are its most flagrant causes. It is high time that 
psychogenetic researches were made in this very promising 
field. 

Precocious gifts are more common. Juvenile prodigies, 
though rare, are better known. Here, again, a few samples 
from our returns must suffice. A girl of ten months beat time 
accurately to even complex music ; another in her second year 
learned to sing many tunes and " had sung before she could 
talk " ; another of two years chimed in wath a shrill, piping 
voice to most of the music habitually heard in the family ; an- 
other had sung several tunes correctly alone, and often tried to 
pick them out on the piano, and would listen long and intently 
as to nothing else ; a boy of four who had had no instruction 
knew and hummed some two score pieces of very different 
character ; a girl of five sang nearly all she said, and kept it up 
at her play about all day, answering questions in crude rhyth- 
mic songs of her own improvisation, her converse with her 
doll and other children being mostly in song, etc. Some be- 
fore school age acquire considerable familiarity with the scale 
and various tempos, and even sing solfeggios and have a 
highly developed sense of rhythm, this being more stressed 
with boys than with girls; but musical precocity in general is 
more common wnth girls. Here, again, we need more detailed 
knowledge. If such children were usually found where much 
music is heard, this fact would suggest that all children may 
have musical capacities more early than is generally thought, 



112 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

which might be developed sooner, and more than we now sup- 
pose. Such gifts are often not hereditary, but appear Hke 
sports, as in the case of mathematical genius. Again, such early- 
talents very often die out, and in at least some of our cases 
the interest in music is practically lost at or even before ma- 
turity, and far more often there is so little depth of soul that 
taste for good music cannot be cultivated. Child compositions 
are usually trivial or affected. Where rhythm is prematurely 
and disproportionately developed it seems ominous for the 
growth of music sense above the order of march or clog dance. 
Still, as a class, these cases need and most often repay such 
efforts, although many infant singers fail to develop voice, and 
some of them seem without the basis of temperament. Read- 
ing music, especially for the piano, seems from our returns to 
be almost a gift with some, while others attain even moderate 
proficiency with great difficulty. Thus, in fine, every stage of 
life seems strewn with wreckage, and if there is early promise 
it is often succeeded by early decay. Musical ability is a deli- 
cate and uncertain plant, the blossom of which by no means 
insures fruitage. Possibly its culture was for long prehistoric 
periods a specialty, till it became, Weismann to the contrary, 
notwithstanding, more or less hereditary, and in subsequent 
mixtures of blood its determinants, having attained a certain 
cohesion among themselves, were crossed by some hyper- 
Mendelian law in the psychic sphere which has few analogies 
in psychic experience. But speculation here is worthless in the 
present stage of psychogenesis. 

Nearly all my own answers to syllabi agree that weather has 
much effect on voice. Hot and damp days cause children to sag, 
lose pitch, sing flat, perhaps relax toward monotone, and lessen 
vocal control. Bad ventilation has the same tendency. Con- 
versely, in bright weather and pure air, voices are less languid, 
more resonant, truer, stronger, and even reading music is dis- 
tinctly improved. Teachers often say that everything affects 
the voice, and even urge that, to be effective, every condition 
must be favorable, or singing lessons should be omitted. Nat- 
urally, to sing goes with joy; therefore, a buoyant tone should 
be another precondition. Too much praise or blame, especially 
if individual, have bad effects which are detailed at length. 
Children should not be made early conscious of the quality of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 113 

their voices by criticism. This is specially dangerous at the 
period of change of voice. Notes grow more chesty and less 
throaty. Girls often lose a few high notes for a time and 
regain them later, requiring from one to four years for perfect 
readjustment. They often think themselves hoarse by spells, 
especially on cool days. Some alternate repeatedly from the 
old to the new register, and some drop suddenly. Boys' voices 
are best about a year before the change. Choir boys often sing 
through the entire change, dropping from soprano to mezzo, 
then alto, then baritone. Although girls' voices change less, 
the change is quite as critical and some think more so than for 
boys. The majority of our respondents think most children 
can sing through mutation with the same impunity with which 
they can talk, and that the only danger lies in maladjustment 
of pitch to the stages of alteration in larynx and chest. A very 
few opine that this is a nascent period when new vocal powers 
are given, which are lost if not utilized betimes, so that this 
period is a judicious teacher's great opportunity, which, if 
neglected, involves grave loss of possibilities never so open be- 
fore or after. 

Singing is at first best learned by imitation, and a good 
collection of songs by rote should always come before all exer- 
cises, scales, and intervals, and long before note reading, which 
is a purely intellectual process. Children get a better grasp of 
pitch, rhythm, etc., if melody is not distracted and harassed 
by notes. Notation comes very late in the history of the race, 
and it is just as monstrous to teach it before the child knows 
many songs by heart as it would be to teach reading before 
the child had a vocabulary or could speak. These, the analo- 
gies between alexia and agraphia on the one hand, and the 
various forms of amusia on the other, bring out in the clear- 
est way when these defects are analyzed.^ 

^ Wallaschek, Richard (Die Bedeutung der Aphasie fiir die Musikvorstellung. 
In Zeitschrift fiir Psychologie und Physiologic der Sinnesorgane, September, 1893, 
vol. 6, pp. 8-32) has shown that there is a marked parallelism between certain 
groups of aphasia and certain forms of defect in musical expression and that some of 
the same defects that exist between writing and drawing, are found between speech 
and singing. Under expression, for instance, there is motor or sensory amusia or 
paramusia and musical amnesia. There is also musical agraphia and paragraphia, 
alexia and paralexia, amimia and paramimia. In the field of musical representation 
we have to choose between three theories: first, cither the localization view of Hitzig; 
9 



114 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

By persistently ignoring this principle, most American 
teachers and texts commit a crime against the child's musical 
nature which is responsible for most of the difficulties they 
encounter, and which creates defects, dulls interest, violates 
gifts, and handicaps work to a degree which, could it be meas- 
ured in financial or other terms of economic waste, would be 
appalling. The American pedagogue finds it vastly more con- 
genial to his, or usually her, instincts to grind the children on 
musical script than to teach them to sing by the ear, and so 
he does it insistently. If a visitor seeks to learn how the class 
has advanced in its musical education, the book is at once called 
for, and its grade, or the number of pages or exercises learned, 
or the facility at sight-reading of a new piece is brought forth 
as a test of proficiency, and the quality of the music, which 
should be the very first, is usually the very last, consideration. 
Most school children will never learn to read and will rarely 
sing a note after their schooling is ended, but if they are left 

second, we may separate the intellectual and emotional expression, or third, the entire 
process of expression may be analyzed into its components. These views, of course, 
do not entirely exclude each other. When it comes to analyzing musical con- 
cepts we have great diversity of view, which is because we have to raise the 
question of the origin of music which is usually placed where its own concepts find 
their strongest association. Then some have derived music from speech, others 
from dramatic action, still others from dancing, others from the feelings, especially 
love. Wallaschek derives it from the tact or time sense, which is closely con- 
nected with rhythmic movement. The correctness of this derivation, he thinks, 
will not be darkened or disputed by those cases of aphasia in which it appears 
that the musical conception and production are composed of different elements. 

Brazier, Dr. (Du Trouble des Facultes Musicales dans I'Aphasie. In Revue 
Philosophique, October, 1892, vol. 34, pp. 337-368) concludes that the theory of 
three images can be applied to music. Auditive images predominate more even than 
they do in speech, but motor images are more prominent than visual. The Knob- 
lauch view that there were nine types of amusia has not held good. But there is 
a useful distinction between total or complex and simple amusia; the latter may 
be grouped into those of reception, of transmission and of expression, corresponding 
in the auditive field to tonal deafness, in the visual to notal blindness or musical 
alexia. The other forms are due to the loss of motor images, whether of singing 
(vocal motor amusia) or in playing instruments (Wallaschek's amimia) or instru- 
mental motor amusia. This scheme seems simple and with a broad clinical basis. 
Amusia may be a corollary of aphasia or be an independent species of it. 

G. Marinesco (Des Amusies. In La Semaine Medicale, February, 1905, vol. 25, 
pp. 49-52) gives an interesting sketch of aphasia in its relations to amusia, showing 
that for some decades alienists have noted the close relation between speech and 
music, the latter being a language "more energetic than speech." The acquisi- 
tion of musical and verbal images a-nd their reproduction where disaggregation 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 115 

with a goodly list of well-chosen songs which they love, their 
sentiments would be developed and their taste formed, and 
most would love music ever after, even if they had never 
learned to read a note. Of the few teachers who accept this 
principle,, there is no agreement as to the proper time for 
learning the notes, the ages proposed ranging all the way from 
seven to fifteen. The custom of having grade teachers give 
instruction in lower classes, and perhaps the fact that we as 
a people are not musically gifted, and the traditional neglect 
of what the plain and simple knowledge of child nature should 
teach, are largely responsible for the above unpedagogic prac- 
tices. 

Tonic Sol-Fa has contributed little of value save the mov- 
able do, but adds distractions galore. Like other novelties, it 
brought enthusiasm to teachers in the days of Kullen and his 
immediate successors. But the analogies with colors and hand 
movements were utterly arbitrary, and the diagrams appealed 

occurs follows very similar lines. As Balle puts it, "auditory musical representa- 
tions are usually organized before those that are verbal and the latter disappear 
first. That is, verbal deafness in disintegration normally comes before musical 
deafness." "Music thus presents a very close resemblance to language. Both 
are symbolic representations. The note or musical symbol can be mentally sung, 
heard, read, written, just as the letter which is the phonic symbol or as the word 
can be pronounced, heard, read, written. The cerebral process is absolutely 
the same and the similitude in education is identical just as for words." 

Still more interesting is the contribution of Pick, A. (Zur Analyse der Elemente 
der Amusie und deren Vorkommen im Rahmen aphasischer Storungen. In 
Monatsschrift fiir Psychiatric und Neurologic, 1905, vol. 18, pp. 87-96), who 
urges that for a complete understanding of aphasia and to fully inbricize all the 
now well-recorded cases it is essential to consider those in which the music sense 
is either congenitally lacking or has been lost. This writer gives a brief review 
of the cases of amusia described since 1879. Tones consist of quality or pitch, 
intensity, timbre and rhythm, and it would appear from this literature that any of 
these may be lacking. Even Billroth in his oft-quoted "Wer ist musikalisch ? " 
described cases of innate absence of the sense of rhythm in normal individuals, 
while it is sometimes very highly developed in low-grade idiots. There are cer- 
tainly well-recorded cases in which all understanding of rhythm and melodic inter- 
vals, together with all motor expression of musical feeling, seem lacking. There 
are both deafness and aphasia of intonation. In some cases this seems connected 
with asymbolism. The facts, however, are so complex, and the clinical material 
at best limited to so few dozen cases, that it is impossible as yet to give a complete 
theory of the complications here involved. It is certain that amusia and aphasia 
are very closely related and analogous. To develop the schema in which both 
belong it is therefore plain, as Pick concludes, that we must "pass from the hitherto 
one-sidedly emphasized intellectual to the adjacent domains of feeling and will." 



Ii6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

only to the intellect. The less allotrious matter carried along 
the better, and every appeal to the eye save for rhythm diverts 
from ear and voice culture, in which all should focus. Tonic 
Sol-Fa may really help experienced singers, but the principle 
often invoked, " if the staff is hard, put it early," is here at 
least perverse. Signs and symbols and all that mentalizes 
should be everywhere subordinated to what emotionalizes. 

(i) Rhythm is the first aspect which is so emphasized in 
all the primitive music, which seems to have a tum-tum origin. 
Its chief features are repetitions and cadences. It is a system 
of beats, accents, stresses, time keepings, and markings, step- 
ping, patting, tapping, striking, measuring arsis and thesis 
with the feet. At first there is little content and little variety, 
but repetition exasperatingly monotonous to cultured nerves. 
A savage band is made up of drums, at first untuned, and, if 
there is a choir, it repeats phrases and words endlessly. The 
child which begins by rhythmically striking one object with 
another, or by keeping tab of sequent impressions on tallies in 
a series of light objects when getting ready to count, hums 
or verbalizes a measure over and over, perhaps slowly evolving 
and intricating it, or learns to beat time, march, sway, or 
gesture, has begim to ascend the long way by which the race 
began its musical development. This stage needs great and 
early emphasis; although, on the other hand, it may become 
excessive and neurotic, as is seen in the counters and beaters. 
Poetry is older than prose, and everything possible in the 
kindergarten and primary grade should take rhythmic charac- 
ter. Rhythm in any form most children love, and clapping, 
patting juba, marching, moving in tempo, metronomes, swings, 
rocking chairs and horses, are favorites, although some in our 
data are made ill by the three latter. Lack of rhythm often 
goes with general disorderliness, and excessive love of it often 
makes children prefer catchy, trashy music if it has a strong 
lilt and swing so they can pat, nod, beat time, etc., as the gal- 
lery in the theater is so prone to do. Cradle and leg time, 
arsis, thesis, the tendency to count in groups, to hum with 
steps, etc., all tend to articulate and cadence the very soul. The 
weaker the rhythm sense is, the more massive and fundamental 
are the movements necessary to learn it. It has social value 
in strengthening unison of movements and, from these, of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC H? 

sentiment. It is difficult for children to feel music without 
movement, so that dancing is a needful auxiliary at a certain 
stage of musical education, which some are now coming to 
think is dwarfed without it. Even musicians often hear music 
with at least periodic motor innervations, and the conductor's 
baton may help to understand new and difficult passages, for 
all music is pervaded by temporal pulsations which both punc- 
tuate and articulate its elements into higher and more com- 
pound unities. A cardinal trait of music at this stage is, there- 
fore, that it should be marchy, dancy, motor, for it must get 
into the muscles. While the child may hear other music, it 
should attend chiefly to this kind. To exercise together with- 
out music is the ghastly mistake of Swedish gymnastics, which 
sins against both motor and musical development. Music 
should go with steps and steps with music. The young person 
who cannot dance is crippled in his appreciation of a certain 
large class of music. There are those who interpret almost 
all kinds of music in terms of motion, supplementing real by 
imaginary movements. The sentence, sense of power, all 
periodicity and style in speech, grace, ease and freedom, which 
are the poetry of movement, find here their chief source. To 
sit still and listen tO' stirring music stunts a musical develop- 
ment in a young child in its very bud, for it feels music chiefly 
as incitement to action. There have been great and precocious 
musical geniuses that have shot up through this stage so rap- 
idly that it was little seen, but it is integral in normal musical 
development, and the born teacher of the art best knows how 
to draw upon and utilize this immense reservoir of motor 
tendency. 

The child best worth educating musically responds deeply 
and early, even if unconsciously, to the sound in nature, the 
first music master of the race. The soughing of the wind 
through the pines stands out uniquely in its effect upon the 
sensitive soul of childhood. It may even cause tears without 
consciousness, for it plays upon the very organism. It is felt 
in most as sadness and restlessness, while the susurrus of the 
breezes among the leaves of deciduous trees is early pleasing 
and exhilarating. The wind is a bandmaster, loved or feared, 
according to the loudness with which his orchestra plays. The 
rattle of the hail, the drip and patter of rain, the silent fall of 



Ii8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

snow, the roll of distant and the crash of near thunder, the 
ripple of streamlets, the roar of waterfalls, the beating of 
waves, and all the many voices of water are great music teach- 
ers. Then, too, there are the symphonies of bees, crickets, and 
even mosquitoes ; the humming, droning, booming buzz of 
larger insects, the piping of tree toads and frogs, even the 
cries of the feles et canes, each has a varied tone language of 
its own to the young ; the bleating of sheep, the lowing of 
herds which give pastoral moods, the call of the wild and the 
cry of the squirrel kind. Above all, the birds, the lonely hoot 
of the owl, the despairing cry of the loon, the caw of crow 
and daw, the scream of the eagle and hawk, the clapper of the 
heron, the cooing of the doves and the song of the warblers, 
which one observer says never sing but only laugh out 
of a heart overflowing with joy; each one of these sounds 
and many more carry with them a whole stage setting of psychic 
moods; and these the tone poet simply must feel abundantly, 
often, and early. Living creatures do not talk to each other, 
for they have no vocabulary of words, but their utterances are 
all of them either love calls, warnings, or danger signals, and 
are more musical than verbal. Some are lullabies, others 
madrigals, or philippics, or notes of defiance, or murmurs of 
parents to their young, and some are voices of the day, others 
of the night or storm. They suggest the heath, the prairie, 
moorland, thicket, mountain, meadow, brook, the spring when 
the migrators come, and the fall when they go. These are the 
things that have played on the soul through all the immemorial 
past, have controlled its moods, and have still a strange power 
to call up imagery. Snatches of these field antiphones are, 
what many careful experiments show, that which music sug- 
gests to all responsive souls. It is these influences that should 
not be evicted by the music-stultifying noises of the city, which 
cause it to focus on erotic, even decadently erotic, themes. So 
far as music is an interpreter of nature, the child must have 
heard, felt, varied influences, or else musical training leaves 
him untouched, because there is nothing in his soul to inter- 
pret. 

(2) Song is story, and to the child is the nourishing root 
of all musical culture. A musician who never sang, or at least 
hummed to himself or herself, can never possibly feel the full 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 119 

power of instrumentation. He must at least hear song in his 
throat, or something vital is lacking. Song, too, must have a 
burden, and programless music comes later. The true bard 
is inspired by his theme and pours forth unpremeditated song, 
because he is drunk with his theme, and therefore carries his 
hearers away. So the great lyrists, from the restored Apollo 
to the gypsy fiddler of to-day in his own habitat, play music 
that to them is crammed full of meaning and content deeper 
than words, and with which they weave their spell. Hence, 
too, the musician must know the great tales of time and men, 
and be inspired by them, so that he can learn to let himself go 
wuth abandon; and his powers of sympathy must be utterly 
untainted by criticism. Story roots of love stronger than 
death, a vengeance where man is a powerless agent of the 
fates, of piety and devotion that immolate self for something 
greater than self — among these the composer finds his Muse. 
Hence, the pupil must know and feel the great mythopoeic 
cycles, especially those of the ancient Greeks, Homer and the 
dramatists ; and the Germans, the Saxon Arthuriad, the Niebe- 
lungen and the rest. All such legendary and heroic lore can- 
not be properly told save in poetry and music, to which they 
incline and inspire the soul. Literature of this class should 
be the handmaiden of art. Above all. Biblical literature and 
the religious instinct should be cultivated. So, too, patriotism 
and the flag, the great historic events and golden deeds of 
virtue, home, and native land are the great themes in all the 
consensus of children's preferences in music. Love comes 
later, and comedy and parody are still later and far less. 

(3) As to instrumentation, wind instruments that are 
blown come nearest the heart. The pipe was first after the 
drum, and to play these is singing with a proxy larynx, while 
breath and feeling are ordinarily very closely akin. Thus the 
young, even near the age of self-consciousness and emotional 
repressions, can still express a sentiment naturally. School 
bands are as hygienic for the feelings as they are for the lungs, 
and from Plato down all have praised martial strains of this 
kind for youth. But in soulfulness, we must agree with 
Gardiner ^ that the violin stands first, hard and late as it arose. 



* The Music of Nature. London, Longmans, 1843, 505 p. 



I20 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Each string has its distinct character. It requires and trains 
great accuracy of ear and touch, and bowing is the best ex- 
pression of music which the hand can make. Perhaps in noth- 
ing does it come so near being the direct organ of the heart. 
How the Hungarian fiddler in his home and native music hugs 
passionately, caresses his instrument, and gets, as Paganini 
did, the most sympathetic and tumultuous response that ever 
instrumentalist won from a crowd! The violin is the school 
instrument in Germany, where most is done in music. The 
ready-made notes and tempered scale of the piano and organ 
are farther off, and their technic is far less expressive of the 
musical theme. The mandolin is a tasteful decoration of bric- 
a-brac for a sophomore's room, but is it quite virile for the 
American man? Is not even the banjo less ladylike and 
evirating? I do not know; why do not musicians tell us? 
Alas ! the pedagogy of music is yet in its diaper and swaddling- 
clothes stage till we know more of the psychology of the chief 
classes of instruments, each of which does different things to 
the soul. 

Keep the technic duly subordinated — pray, ponder this. 
Let me repeat : Is it not just as absurd to teach the children 
notes and the scale before they have learned a repertory of 
songs by rote as it would be to teach reading before the child 
learns to talk? The prime end of musical education in the 
grades is to train the sentiments, to make children feel nature, 
religion, country, home, duty, and all the rest, to guarantee 
sanity of heart out of which are the issues of life. To this, 
technic and everything else should be subordinated. Again, 
teachers must sing to the children if they can only croon or 
intone poetry. I would have a pianola in every high school 
and college with a few score of well-chosen selections. In 
pubescence, when the life of sentiment awakens, probably 
music has its most potent influences in stirring and ex- 
panding the soul. Much school music is now chosen merely 
with reference to some scheme of pedagogic, systematic pro- 
gression. Much method here is a sin against the holy ghost 
of music itself. Every tune introduced should have a moral 
and aesthetic justification, and should be admitted to the school 
canon only after careful deliberation and for good and suffi- 
cient reasons. And then, and only then, will music be rescued 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 121 

from its present abject degradation, and given its rightful, 
commendable place in the curriculum as the trainer of the feel- 
ings. 

I wish music teachers would read a little more, and see 
their work in the larger light now dawning. They might at 
least know Pilo, Gardiner, Wallace,^ Wallaschek,^ possibly- 
even Gurney,^ not to add Darwin, Spencer, and Weismann's 
dilettante and hypersubtle theorization. Then there is the sec- 
ond part of Helmholtz's masterpiece, " On the Sensations of 
Tone," which gives the history of music on a scientific basis. 
There are other works by Ritter, Paine, Henderson, Nerlich, 
Kostlin, Bartholomew, and Stumpf, who thinks that purity of 
music and race type come together, that the male voice was once 
very high, and that woman first began to sing, and that use 
or practicality has caused the development of music. Then 
there are the simpler results of the study of children's choices, 
from discriminations of pitch, from their range of ear, their 
sense of timbre, the imagery that music excites, which Gilman 
and Downey have studied, and even the responses of infants 
to music; while Dr. Theodate Smith is preparing a work on 
the psychic reactions to sound by infants and children, and 
fuller studies are being made upon imitation and upon musical 
imagery by Weld. 

Under Mr. David Manners as conductor, one can now hear 
classical music at the Musical School Settlement on New York's East 
Side, where three hundred and seventy-five children from six to 
seventeen study under a faculty of thirty-two members and actually 
support the school. They fall into three classes : those who love 
music, those who find themselves in it and may become players in 
orchestras, and those who have ability to become teachers. The 
school is not open to the criticism sometimes made of trying to train 
musicians out of tinkers and tailors, nor does it cause dissatisfac- 
tion or interfere with school. For a fuller account see Tapper, T., 
Music and East Side Children, The Outlook, 1908, Vol. 88, pp. 
428-432. 

Interesting and curious was the production of the " Messiah " 
during Holy Week at Landsborg, Kansas, a Swedish town of two 
thousand. Twenty-five years ago Bethany College here instituted 

^ Wallace, Wm., Threshold of Music. Macm., London, 1908, 267 p. 
^ Wallaschek, R., Primitive Music. Longmans, London, 1893, 326 p. 
3 Gurney, Edmund, The Power of Sound. Smith, London, 1880, 559 p. 



122 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

this performance, which has become an annual festival which some 
fifteen thousand people have heard. There is a chorus of six hundred 
voices and sixty pieces. In one case three generations sang. 

There are two ideals toward one of which most conductors tend. 
The one exhorts to beauty of musical structure, loves composition as 
fluent architecture, makes the texture of the counterpoint or bril- 
liancy and mellowness of instrumentation or melodies works of fine 
art. The other exhorts to intensity of emotional effects, gets as 
near as possible to pure feeling, conveys mood, seeks expressiveness, 
sways the soul by strains of invigorating dance music, thrills one 
with rhythm, brings great climaxes. Each extreme has its defects 
and its virtues. Naturally Boston inclines toward the former. 

Dr. L. Wiillner, whose singing has been received almost as enthu- 
siastically as Paderewski's playing, has a voice of poor quality but is 
a marvelous musical and dramatic interpreter of poetry — the poetry 
of thought and music and words, and the music of poetry. He has 
certainly remarkable intellectual power of emotional insight and 
dramatic expression so that his voice is in some sense a subordinate 
accessory. His art is very versatile. 

Arthur Whiting, a well-known pianist, composer, and teacher in 
New York, believing that colleges do not recognize music enough, 
some two years ago formed a plan to enable undergraduates to hear 
eight concert lectures on classical and chamber music. Attendance 
was to be voluntary and without charge, but expenses were de- 
frayed by collections from the alumni. These were well attended, 
and considerable information, biography, history, as well as explana- 
tions of thematic and poetic construction, were brought out. Never- 
theless, the real success of the enterprise is doubtful, though it seems 
to have great possibilities. 

We persistently and with stupidity ineffable assume that 
musical education is all in performance; and every child up 
the grades is mechanically trained in proportion as it can sing 
or play. A critic or even a hearer of music is always asked 
if he can play or sing; and, if not, his opinion is thought of 
little account. Now this is just as absurd as it would be to 
estimate the child's literary knowledge by what it can actually 
read itself. Over against all this lies the far wider domain 
of musical appreciation. Children should, in fact, hear vastly 
more music than they sing or play; and this should be a 
prominent, if not a predominant, part of their musical train- 
ing. They must listen and be taught how to do so by abun- 
dant experience and practice. Everyone available should sing 
or play to them, and any and all the mechanical players should 
be laid under tribute. Even the hand organ has its genuine 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 123 

uses, and is a real aid at a certain stage of musical develop- 
ment. There is now no excuse for the narrow, dense ignorance 
and inexperience of so many young people in this field. In 
every schoolroom where there is a piano there should be a 
pianola of some kind, and a very carefully selected collection 
of rolls, graded to each age and stage, and often used not only 
in connection with opening and closing exercises, but as the 
basis of education in musical appreciation, so that musical 
ideas, phrases, motives, composition, and analysis should be 
progressively known. More of this, even at the expense of 
a good deal of the time now given to note work, would bring 
far more rapid progress; and, what is more essential, would 
secure more of the chief ends of musical education in the way 
of developed taste and experience. It is amazing, in view of 
the great value of results that lie so near at hand, that I have 
never seen or, after some inquiry, even heard of a single school 
that has not only added the pianola as an essential annex, but 
developed a strictly graded pedagogic course in musical hear- 
ing. One reason, I am told, is that the ladies who usually play 
the piano are jealous of the larger role of pieces and better 
execution of these machines. Here, again, the rights and needs 
of children suffer from the ignorance or caprice of adults. 

(a) As to musical instruction in college, musical culture in 
its large sense is the most liberal and humanistic of all studies, 
perhaps not even excepting literature. From this, it follows 
that there is no subject in the high-school and college cur- 
riculum that should be taken by so large a proportion of stu- 
dents. About every young man and maiden should do some- 
thing with it. Why do I make so large a claim ? Because, as 
we have seen, music is the language of the feelings, sentiments, 
and emotions ; or, in a word, of the heart, and because these 
constitute three fourths of life, and all of them come into 
being or are immensely reenforced and augmented during 
adolescence, which covers all the early teens and the very early 
twenties. Speech is the language of the intellect, but the feel- 
ings are older and vaster. The intellect is chiefly a product 
of the individual development, but the heart represents the 
race, and is hence more generic and basal. We Americans are 
more prone than any other race to be defective, ungemutlich, 
more liable to have our emotional life grow sterile and desic- 



124 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

cated. Thus it is the function of music to restore, deepen, en- 
large, intensify, and express. Our very language is prone to 
be deficient in action, feeling, and speech music. If we have 
feelings in youth, we soon come to deem it good form to con- 
ceal them, even if they are good and wholesome, although 
thought itself, if not painted and toned by sentiment, is arid 
and dead. Music makes the world tinglingly real again. It 
restores the soul to meanings, and the great tone poets who 
organized the sound world take us out of our narrowness into 
the universe and make us feel the cosmic powers. They add 
new and brighter colors to the palette of experience, and not 
only discipline the heart, but free us from false, frivolous, lan- 
guishing, bad feelings, create new blends of them, and give 
us the more and fuller life for which we pant and of which 
our nerves are scant. Music, like God, sees only the heart. 
It is a language of quintessences, the only perfect philosophy 
and true metaphysics. Modern aesthetics shows us in great 
detail how national and historic music reflects the soul of races 
and ages — Greek, Italian, Teutonic, French, etc. In such 
phrases, which represent the essential viewpoints of Schopen- 
hauer, Helmholtz, Gurney, Haweis, Stumpf, Ha1tett,'^and oth- 
ers, how can we avoid drawing the momentous practical infer- 
ence that more and better musical culture is one of the chief 
needs of our age and land ? So my first plea is for more ex- 
tensive musical culture, that almost all our academic youth 
learn to sing or play or, at the very least, be taught to know, 
love, and more intelligently appreciate good music in order to 
normalize and regenerate their emotional life, to make them 
feel country and nature in all their aspects, religion in all its 
breadth and depth, to sanify and idealize the affections and 
even war if, in the course of human events, it should become 
necessary to risk life for country. Relegate to the second or 
third place the technic that all teachers tend to push to the 
foreground, and constitute yourselves guardians responsible 
for the vigor and healthfulness of the emotional nature of the 
young. Break the iron law which tends in the kindergarten 
to put Tonic Sol-Fa in the primary school, intellectual instruc- 
tion in staff, scales, and intervals in the grades, and the theory 
of harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, and instrumentation 
in the college and university ahead of wide acquaintance and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 125 

intimate heart-to-heart appreciation of a generous repertory 
of masterpieces. A German fifth-grade class I once visited 
could sing for me any one of fifty chorals or folk songs by 
heart, but could not yet read notes. How many of the great 
composers knew the intricate theories of super- and subdom- 
inant triads, dispersed harmony, inverted suspensions, or could 
have passed one of our college examinations in Spalding and 
Chadwick? Too much technic and too little early familiar 
acquaintance with music is the letter that kills. I know a 
high school that had a vigorous choral union of seventy in- 
struments and voices combined, and which gave half a dozen 
concerts during the year of, on the whole, very good music, 
until a university hard by heard of it and decided to give 
credit for entrance examinations in musical theory, with the 
result that the half dozen leaders withdrew from the union 
(which soon collapsed without them) to study theory from 
books. 

Some American colleges encourage banjo and mandolin 
clubs, composed usually of two or three crude amateurs who 
can snap off a few popular catchy and perhaps even " kicky " 
airs and a larger number of accompanists who can just play 
a few chords, and permit these organizations to give concerts 
and perhaps to make tours, occasionally contributing to their 
expenses. Often glee clubs are organized on a similar low 
level, who croon college ditties of the Polly-wolly-doodle or 
Mary's Little Lamb order. The fatuity and utter banality of 
the words and the cheapness of the music of the lowest strata 
of college songs soberly sung by rows of stalwart college bar- 
barians in evening dress often suggest down-right infantil- 
ism. The fun of it all has a pathetic tang for every musical 
connoisseur, and when such clubs essay serious sentiments, 
these are all so crude and lush that such performances consti- 
tute a unique badge of our national (academic) inferiority in 
music. Institutions often think such concert tours valuable as 
recruiting agencies because callow youth of the home town 
admire and wonder, and are made converts thereby to the 
higher education. In the programmes there are usually sam- 
ples of ragtime and of the latest, lightest comic operas to 
which admiring audiences beat time. Perhaps all this has its 
place, a touch of it but not too much of it, but it belongs to 



126 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the fraternity house or to the athletic field beside the college 
yell, or lower down in the high school. Its elemental rhyth- 
mic quality is basal as the tom-tom and has its place, but, like 
much of our school music, it belongs to younger grades. At 
any rate, most of the best agree that this is a musical level 
which the college should now ignore and which a department 
of music ought to discourage, because overcultivation of this 
stage is very easy, and, where it occurs, it tends strongly to 
arrest the higher development of musical ability. I am con- 
vinced that many American collegians are now suffering ar- 
rest from the hypertrophy of this crudest and most rudimentary 
form of musical propensity — and among these I must, alas, 
count myself. 

(&) As to musical training for intending school teachers, 
great disparity is found even in colleges which have both a 
normal and a musical department. Some, even of the latter, 
make no provision for teaching music to the pedagogues that 
seek degrees from them, professors holding such work tO' be 
too elementary for them to engage in, or having no time for it. 
In most such institutions something, but too little, is done, and 
that little is almost always ill adapted to its purpose. In these 
respects we have very much to learn from the higher normal 
courses of Europe, and especially those of Germany, where the 
theory and practice are roughly as follows : The very first con- 
sideration is the sentiment taught or reenforced by the music, 
for here lies its chief educational effect, since it can train the 
heart as nothing else can do. The theme of most vocal school 
music is either nature, home, country, or religion, and its value 
is chiefly measured according to how much it can dO' in 
strengthening loyalty to these. Next comes the quality of the 
music itself, and of course all the works of the great composers 
are ransacked to compile from them a curriculum or canon of 
the best. The teachers must know several scores of selections, 
both words and music, by heart, and be able to teach them by 
rote. Folk songs and ballads lead, and next come simple but 
often exquisite selections or simplifications from the great 
composers. Every academic student preparing to teach in 
Germany must not only know a large repertory of such songs, 
but must play the violin or piano, the former usually preferred, 
especially for rural schools. Nearly every teacher can and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 127 

must sing- a little, and most of the music in the folk schools 
is taught by regular teachers, and not by specialists. To fit 
young, men and especially young- women for such work is the 
chief function of this academic department. Everything- tech- 
nical is subordinated to the spirit, and so music is felt. 
Here, on the other hand, colleges train prospective teachers, 
if at all, chiefly in technic and note reading, with only the 
slightest regard to the quality of the music or the subject of 
the song, while the publishers sell annually tons of juvenile 
music books chiefly devoted to method, to analysis of processes 
that never ought to be analyzed, at least for novices, inane 
exercises, cheap songs, many of them manufactured by the 
authors of the text or selected almost at random with little 
regard to educational values, but often for purely methodic 
reasons. Just as bad English teaching almost invites slang, 
so unpedagogic musical instruction invites the cheap kind of 
music which is often a positive obsession that haunts adoles- 
cents in high school and college, and leads to the kind of mu- 
sical emporium I discredited above, for musical jingles that 
cannot be banished from the mind, but cling like burrs, are . 
products of bad musical education. The college training of 
future teachers here needs two things : first, far more special 
attention and time; and, second, a radical reconstruction of 
both its matter and methods. 

(c) Another function of collegiate instruction in music is 
to cultivate in those who will never become performers good 
taste and the power to appreciate and understand music. This 
is often a specified function, and is one of the purposes of col- 
lege concerts, recitals, festivals, and of some of the courses, 
especially those in the history of music and the biographies of 
musicians. As a branch of all truly liberal culture, music can 
now claim a high and ever higher place. Modern psychology 
and aesthetics can hardly lay too great stress upon the educa- 
tional value of familiarity with the great works of the best 
masters for young men and maidens. The coming theory is 
in outline, that good music faintly awakens the echoes of the 
ancestral experience of the race and causes the psychic traces 
and rudiments of what our remote forebears did, suffered, 
feared, loved, and fought for to reverberate again in our souls. 
The great composer wakens these dying echoes, and causes 



128 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the soul to crepitate with prehistoric reminiscences that can 
never surge up into the full light of consciousness. As the 
murmur of the ocean shell held to the ear, poets tell us, relates 
the secrets of the deep, so music puts us en rapport with the 
lives of the great cloud of witnesses who constitute our an- 
cestors back and down we know not how far, perhaps to the 
earliest forms of mammalian or even vertebrate life, or even 
lower. We remember the phases of the past estate of the race 
from which we sprang, and rehearse, if ever so faintly, its 
joys, sorrows, victories, defeats, longings, exultations, and de- 
pressions. The soul becomes a resonance chamber for any and 
every, however slightly revivable, reminiscence, not of a preex- 
istent state in Plato's sense, but of the experience we inherited 
from the long line of our predecessors who have bequeathed 
to us each the quintessential residue of their life history which 
music puts into our possession. Thus, by a sympathetic ap- 
preciation of music, the soul revisits the dim racial past, com- 
munes with the countless generations gone before, participates 
again in their fate, pastimes, and fortunes, so that in a sense 
they awaken and rehearse their story in our souls. 

But music is not only recessional, but processional. It is 
inspired with the ennobling push up toward the superman that 
is to be. We expand the narrow limits of our own individual- 
ity toward the dimensions of the race and the past and the 
future. This interpretation of musical feeling is not sentiment, 
but scientific evolution in this field, or, more specifically, 
genetic psychology. The golden age of musical appreciation 
is the decade of adolescence, say from fourteen to twenty-four, 
when the soul needs and responds quickest to all the vastating 
influence which is great and beneficent beyond anything in 
literature or any other art. 

Thus I urge that the greatest of all the functions of college 
music is to acquaint not only special but general students with 
a wide range of the best music, to insure not only acquaintance 
with, but infection by, the great masterpieces of all lands and 
ages. In many colleges, students can hear but pitifully little 
good music, and in all I believe that the function of listening 
and the detailed acquaintance that can come only by repetition 
should be a much greater function than it now is. The ^olian, 
the Cecilian, and Pianola should not be despised, and should 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 129 

be vastly more utilized in every school of music. These me- 
chanical players are admirably adapted for the analysis of 
musical structures, for the study of style, movements, composi- 
tion, and the vast and rapidly growing body of music now- 
playable from paper rolls is a godsend to everyone interested 
in music, whether lay or professional. These enable the stu- 
dent to widen the horizon of his knowledge, cultivate taste, 
discrimination, intelligence, and thus enhance his appreciation 
of the performance of great artists, orchestras, and choruses. 

(d) Again, I plead for a richer and better course in the 
history of music from its beginning on to the present. It is a 
wonderful and magnificent story, beginning with the crude, 
incessantly repeated, rhythmic phrase on to homophonic mel- 
ody, moving about independently of the key tone like the old 
tragic chorus, the intonations of the church, and the Italian 
declamatory recitative. The polyphony of the tenth and sub- 
sequent centuries wove independent melodies together, assign- 
ing little value to harmony as such. The evolution of the 
major scale from the old Ionic and of the minor out of the 
other five antique scales, the development of the progress from 
madrigal to opera, in tragic chorus to oratorio, the evolution 
of pure instrumentation, are all fascinating chapters. In such 
a historic course, which should be thorough and prolonged, all 
should center about actual music, and the standard productions 
of the great masters should be incessantly repeated and the'' 
story of their lives known. Such illustrations are now prac- 
tical in these days of mechanical players. This historical course 
should not only be broad and thorough, but the point of de- 
parture for every other department. Growth responds tO' 
growth and genius provokes response and appeals profoundly 
to the faculties of youth, for progress is inspiration to the 
young. Every great composer of the past should have his 
week or month of daily work, and every great era its full term 
of exclusive study, and everything should be practical, with a 
rich historic perspective. Thus something or some one will 
make a special appeal to every student, even those who cannot 
appreciate the latest and most evolved styles and writers. 

The first accessory to musical education should be mythol- 
ogy, especially the great mythopoeic themes and cycles that 
have made so many of the great dramas and epics of the 
10 



I30 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

world's literature, and which constitute the grand ethnic Bibles 
of races. The traditional material which has vitality enough 
to survive for centuries and millennia by oral transmission and 
without the aid of print — this should be the constant study of 
every candidate for a musical career or degree. Wagner has 
only suggested to the world the possibilities of musical inspira- 
tion that lie in this field. He revealed and revived the Ger- 
many of pre-Christian centuries, the legends of the youth of 
the world, the heroes that loom up from the dim past, the great 
men of earth, its prophets — the story of the Golden Fleece, of 
Orestes, Agamemnon, Prometheus, Iphigenia, Electra, Ajax, 
^neas and Dido, Siegfried, Brunhilde, Parsifal, Arthur, 
Beowulf, illusions that center about a Golden Age, about na- 
tional redeemers — ^material that historians reject, but that folk- 
loreists and students of the origins of literature reveal. These 
are what the musician ought to know who wants to be a 
prophet and apostle of the folk soul and make its creations live 
again. He should know and feel the most characteristic and 
dramatic situations, and find in these the source of his inspira- 
tion, setting the grandest editions of the race to music before 
attempting its purer forms. Thus, when it comes to composi- 
tion, the novice should not forget that the individual repeats 
the history of the race, and first essay some simple melodies 
to sweeten and enforce old moving folk poems, for these an- 
cient mythic themes speak to the heart of love, piety, heroism, 
and it is in the interpretation of these that creativeness is most 
favored. Let the young composer, then, first essay songs 
richly set in gesture, posture, pantomime and declamatory ac- 
tion, for out of this music arose, for tone and tune once only 
reenforced words and meanings. Thus, I urge that infection 
with much of this legendary myth material should always be 
prescribed, and that the department of literature represented 
by the old epic, and the great stories of ancient and modern 
drama should be the first outside course insisted upon for the 
young musician, long before acoustics of tone, and even before 
the French, Italian, and German languages, which, of course, 
every graduate of a musical course should know. 

(e) One very pertinent point is the effect of music upon 
the nervous poise and control of those who love it. The very 
neurons may be musically famished or overfed, may be tense 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 131 

and overwrought with incessant occupation with tedious and 
famiHar elements, or thrilled and exhilarated by great com- 
positions, old or new. Between all these extremes there lies 
always a normal optimum which every musician should find 
and live as near to as possible, equidistant from every kind of 
excess or defect. Music that calms should thus offset that 
which excites; that which rests should relieve us from that 
which fatigues. Nearly all musicians have here a unique 
problem with their own nervous system which only they can 
solve, but which must be solved as seriously as one seeks sal- 
vation. When we meet broken-down musicians in nervine 
hospitals and asylums, this problem has passed beyond their 
own power to solve alone, but there was a time when nearly 
all could probably have saved themselves by proper insight 
and regimen. I am convinced that it is not music itself, but 
the fact that the kind of music most habitual is a misfit which 
is chiefly responsible for the neurotic and neurasthenic states 
into which musicians, especially lady teachers of it, sometimes 
fall, and that music has a great, as yet unexploited, power to 
heal its own wounds.^ In proof of this there are clinical 

' Dr. Ireland (Dr. William W. Ireland. On Affections of the Musical Faculty 
in Cerebral Diseases. In Journal of Mental Science, July, 1894, vol, 40, pp. 354- 
367) long ago concluded that the brain seat of musical feeling must not be limited to 
that involved in sensory or motor aphasia but that it must be located at least in 
both hemispheres and could be extinguished only by lesions on both sides. He 
finds that the musical faculty may survive after very extensive disturbances of the 
cortex. 

Legge (Richard Legge, M.D. Music and the Musical Faculty in Insanity. 
In Journal of Mental Science, July, 1894, vol. 40, pp. 368-375) finds that in acute 
mania there is great incoherence of musical as of other thought. In chronic mania 
musical performance is without expression and everything is played not as the music 
requires, but as the feelings of the moment prompt. Melancholiacs are not pleased 
at music. In general paralysis there is great exaggeration of musical as of other 
powers. In dementia the aesthetic feelings decay early and perhaps first. In 
partial manias the musical faculty may be unimpaired. Only in general paralysis 
is the musical ear affected. 

J. C. Hadden (Music as a Medicine. Music, 1895-96, vol. 9, p. 359) reviews the 
studies of the therapeutic value of music and finds them rather confusing. Some think 
the action is chiefly on the heart, others on the respiration; one thinks the activity 
of the skin is affected, and others have thought it had wondrous charm in causing 
fatigue to vanish. Dr. Warthain, of Vienna, hypnotized patients and dosed them 
with music. In their normal state they were unaffected, but by suggestion all the 
vital functions became greatly modified. The ameliorative power of music was 
well understood in classical antiquity and indeed it has always been used to soothe 



132 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

records that could be cited. Of course we have yet much to 
learn of the sanifying and unsanifying effects of music, but 
the fact already stands out that the highly unstable age of 
youth is most of all sympathetic to both these influences. 
Again, even purely instrumental music not only has hygienic, 
but moral quality and influence, and this, although not defin- 
able, is easily detectible. It stimulates the highest as well as 



the sickly. And down through the middle ages various physicians developed 
cures and ascribed magic powers to it. It is particularly effective in driving away 
the devil. Perhaps it may have diagnostic value. There are some who ascribe 
their cure from insanity to it. It may have a medical future. P. Pastnor (Music 
as Medicine. Music, 1898-99, vol. 15, p. 650) tells of the great efficacy of singing in 
hospitals and pleads that this influence be more generally recognized. Of course 
much depends upon the temperament of the patient, but the question why more 
is not done to bring out the therapeutic effect of music is hard to answer. E. A. 
Smith (The Influence of Music upon Life and Health. Music, 1895, vol. 8, p. 361) 
gives concrete cases to illustrate the same theme. Very interesting are the ex- 
periments of Patrici (Music and the Cerebral Circulation of Man), who found a 
patient whose brain was so exposed that he could test the influence of different 
kinds of music upon his cerebral circulation. The depressing or exalting character 
of music upon this boy did not correspond to the abasement or elevation of the 
plethysmograph curve. All music calls blood to the brain. H. W. Stratton (The 
Keynote in Therapeutics. Arena, 1901, vol. 25, p. 287) thinks that certain kinds of 
music are positively nutritive, and that for those who have musical capacity its cura- 
tive value is far greater than is now suspected. But there must be careful adjustment. 
Allegro is not suitable to high-strung nerves, nor is adagio to lethargy. Always 
we should closely adhere to the keynote for this dominating center, this great factor 
in convalescence. There is such a thing as a total cure. The major triad bright- 
ens, promotes cheerfulness, while the minor triad depresses and should be used 
but very little, and its harmonies should be kept within the jurisdiction of the key- 
note. 

Naecke (Les Distractions, Visites, Theatre, Excursions, Musique, etc., Dans 
le Traitement des Alienes. Reviewed in Revue de Psychiatric, 1897, pp. 259-269) 
makes an earnest plea for diversion for the insane as well as nonrestraint, which 
he deems the chief factor in moral reeducation. Patients must not be treated as 
children but as adults, with responsibility, dignity and, indeed, with great tact. 
Very often a diversion of their energy and attention as long continued is the most 
curative possible method. 

E. Lamprecht (Die Taubstummen und die Musik. In Zeitschrift fiir padago- 
gische Psychologie, Pathologic und Hygiene, Sept., 1908, vol. 10, pp. 84-91) advo- 
cates the exposure of deaf-mutes, especially those who are only partially deaf, to 
music, even when the response is chiefly in the form of sensations of vibrations 
in stomach, hips, feet, or sensation of cold in the for:head or other of the many 
sensory reactions noticed in the deaf. The reflex tonicities music causes are of 
pedagogic value. Sometimes the deaf take peculiar and very likely affected pleas- 
ure in coming into contact with music. Certainly rhythm can be greatly helped 
thereby. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC I33 

the lowest powers. It may evoke morbid languishing pathet- 
icism that chills the joy and zest of life to insipidity, or it may 
make the world seem more real and life more earnest, and 
endow every experience with enhanced worth. The moods 
which it commands constitute, after all, its deepest and most 
lasting value or harm, and especially to the plastic and sus- 
ceptible stage of student life. Only those who have systemat- 
ically collected confidential youthful confessions of how music 
brightens and exhilarates or depresses and dismalizes life can 
realize its usiually but little suspected potency over the soul in 
its struggles up to full maturity, and it is chiefly this I would 
have preferred to spend my time in trying to bring home to 
the better knowledge of college professors of music, who have 
doubtless all felt, but probably forgotten, as we are all so 
wont to do, most of those very deep but essentially transient 
and lapsible experiences of the seething age of the later teens 
and early twenties. 

(/) Finally, music gives us confidence in, and respect for, 
human nature. One reason why we enjoy a great work of 
musical art is that we realize that it was produced more or less 
spontaneously out of the depths of the soul of a genius, and 
hence we feel that his soul is sound to the core, and, since the 
power to appreciate is a small degree of precisely the same 
kind of psychic energy that creates, we feel that we, too, are 
sane and healthful in the depths of our being. Helmholtz is 
right that the art connoisseur abhors chiefly the signs of con- 
scious and deliberate purpose to produce this or that result by 
this or that means, and wants instead purely instinctive irre- 
sistible spontaneity. The composer must sing as the bird sings, 
because he cannot help it. Music is thus a message to the ordi- 
nary and more superficial conscious and self-conscious life 
from the profounder regions of the unconscious and instinctive 
substrata of the human nature which constitutes nine tenths of 
life — a message which says " all down here is beautiful, har- 
monious, and there is overflowing superfluity of vitality." 
This is the voice of the race saying to the individual, " You 
may be sore bestead, weak, vacillating, ignorant, in doubt; 
but, if your bark sinks, it is to a larger sea, and there are ever- 
lasting arms beneath in your own soul." It is the heart out 
of which are the issues of life, irrigating, refreshing, inform- 



134 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ing, reenforcing the dusty, moiling intellect. Hence, it follows 
that there may be too much and too 'incessant analysis, crit- 
icism, and self-consciousness in our academic curricula. We 
can no more create musical genius here than in other fields. 
All greatness is more born than made, but more easily than in 
other fields we can destroy the buds of genius by superfcetation 
of precept, mere erudition and theory. Musical appreciation 
evokes musical creativeness, and it is music itself, much of it 
and often, that inspires, and not the discussion and technic 
that teachers tend to lapse toward almost in direct proportion 
to their inability to create or even to execute. As in all other 
branches, here there are teachers of music who are musically 
sterile and exhausted, and is it not they who are more often 
the methodasters prone to magnify pet devices? It is at any 
rate when theory is predominant that music tends tO' become 
manufactured and made by rule, perhaps correct, but content- 
less and dead, with no message or gospel from the oversoul 
to us. 

Thus, in a day when psychologists are realizing with one 
accord that the feelings are far vaster than the intellect and 
will, and are more important for health and sanity, it is clear 
that music teachers more than any other class are charged with 
the custody and responsibility of the hygiene of the emo- 
tional life. Do they sufficiently realize that music may en- 
feeble, corrupt, seduce, degrade, let loose the worst things in 
the soul — that it may bring neurasthenia, loss of control, 
neurotic instability, pollute the very springs of life, as well as 
degrade taste to tawdriness and puerility, while, on the other 
hand, good music may almost create virtue and tune the heart 
to all that is good, beautiful, and true, bring poise, courage, 
enthusiasm, joy of life, tone up weakness and cadence the soul 
to religion and morals? Just as there is a literature so bad 
that one had far better go through life illiterate than to read, 
so there is music so corrupting and neurotic that the densest 
ignorance of this great art is better than knowledge and ac- 
quaintance with it. This moral and hygienic quality of music 
is the theme on which I would like to dwell, but I will only 
say in closing that it is a fact now, as it was in the days of 
Plato, who would banish the Lydian and Ionian musicians, 
retaining only the Doric and Phrygian, that precisely this dis- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF MUSIC 135 

tinction between moral and immoral music is perceived just 
in proportion as an age is endowed with true musical gifts. 
Lack of these ethical and educative characteristics is our pre- 
dominant national musical weakness, for the chief of all prob- 
lems in this field is the effect of music upon the morals and 
the nerves.-^ 



* See Farnsworth, Charles Hubert, Education through Music. New York, 
American Book Co., 1909, 208 p. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN AND THE 
SUNDAY-SCHOOL 

The ideal in religious education — Place of the mother — The concept of 
religion we need to start from — Critique of ethical culture — The 
religion of the cultivated adult intellect no guide in teaching chil- 
dren — National loss of contact with childhood — Defects of Sunday- 
school and Bible pedagogy — The Old Testament shotdd first pre- 
dominate over the New — The latter is chiefly for adolescence — Jesus' 
humanity should be taught before his divinity — Stories should pre- 
dominate — Grotesque absurdity of certain Sunday-school methods 
illustrated — Use of non-Biblical sources— Pedagogic need and place 
of the higher criticism and also of the miraculous elements — Needs 
of educated young men and women not met — Harnack's proposi- 
tion — The Sunday-school in England — New steps the church should 
take to recover its lost influence. 

A COMPLETE religious education on the recapitulatory- 
theory would be to give each child a touch of the best in every 
religion through which the race has passed from the lowest 
to the highest. Most great classes of natural objects and 
phenomena have been worshiped somewhere, some time, by 
some race; and, if all the potentialities which the race has ever 
shown exist in germ in every normal child, why should we 
not, if we follow an ideal system, put him through a course 
beginning with fetishism and ending with pantheism, if those 
philosophies of religion are right which make these the alpha 
and omega respectively of religious evolution? Thus, from 
reverencing charms, mascots, and hoodoos, the child would 
pass in some order yet to be determined through the worship 
of rocks and stones, sun, moon, stars, clouds, storm, wind, 
thunder, fire, sea, streams, trees, flowers, animals, diseases, 
heroes, ancestors, virtues, and mythic personifications of all 
these, on to that of the great cosmos itself. In fact, the rudi- 
ments and buds of every one of all the ancient religions are 
136 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I37 

found in the child's soul ; and they are developed to some ex- 
tent, not as full-blown cults or religious finalities, but by sym- 
pathy, poetry, nature study, etc., for these live, move, and have 
their being in the faculties that the child inherits from his 
remote forebears, to some of whom, in his long line of descent, 
each and every part and aspect of nature was probably once a 
supreme object of worship. Culture interest in these things 
is thus the creation of the old religions, and our aesthetic love 
of nature had its phyletic origins in superstitions which con- 
nected these with human weal or woe. Hence, folklore and 
myth in children are like the husk or shell that protects the 
growing kernels from which the very bread of life, science, 
literature, art, religion, are made, and that falls off only when 
the grain is ripe. 

How completely each of these stages can, or should, be 
caused to develop in each child is primarily a question of the 
amplitude of its psychic endowment and the vigor of its growth 
impulse. A transcendent genius who could grow mentally 
until fourscore years of age might perhaps recapitulate all 
with more or less fullness in the course of his own life. Goethe 
gives us some glimpse of what such a man might be and do. 
Max Miiller has told us that in India the children are often 
crass idolators, busy with amulets and charms; the parents, 
neglecting this, worship the great gods that personify elements 
— Brahman, Vishnu, Siva, and the rest — while the grand- 
father has passed beyond the adoration of all objects or per- 
sonalities, and found rest for his soul in the infinite and eter- 
nal one and all. A child might conceivably be trained in all 
the beliefs, rites, and customs, e. g., of Catholicism, and at 
first accept all as literal. If endowed with religious genius, 
he would later surely come to regard all he had learned as 
symbols, tropes, and figures of an all-embracing religion of 
humanity. He would learn that no creed or form says what 
it means, but is only a type of the forever unexpressed. Such 
a seer might in very deed be a devotee of every faith, a true 
initiate into every cult, the real worshiper of every totemic 
emblem, of Ahriman, Osiris, Orpheus, Jove, Jehovah, and the 
rest ; he might be a Confucian, Buddhist, Mohammedan, Chris- 
tian, all in due proportion ; and, if he could not worship every 
deity at every shrine, would at least know that it was because 



138 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

he had unused powers or was incompletely developed. If a 
safe, working majority of his faculties worship the truest, 
highest, and best in the right way, it would suffice. He might 
adore each in turn with abandon according to the formulae of 
henotheism, making each supreme in succession. 

Such would be the religion of the ideal sage or superman 
who, however, alas ! has not yet existed. Life is too short and 
our souls too small, so that most men can have but one or, at 
most, a few altars; and devotion to one or to a small group 
means the dethronement if not the diabolization of the others. 
With a new love, the old too often turns to hate, and a new 
affection becomes expulsive of the old. Religion always tends 
to violate the principle of the Aristotelian temperance. Its 
pristine affirmations are so emphatic that they have to find 
expression in negations and denials. Thus, one stage discredits 
those that went before, and we may be most intolerant of those 
creeds which we have but just discarded. Intolerance and even 
persecution and religious wars may arise as well as narrow 
orthodoxies, which are sad expressions of the limitations of 
man's religious nature. Thus, religion is defective whenever 
we forget that the same All-father has been worshiped, though 
imperfectly, by every sincere member of every pagan faith. 
Religious pedagogy must accept these limitations and make 
the best of them. Although recognizing that there is good in 
all, it must select and curricularize the best and neglect the 
rest, content to do what it can with the remnant of religious 
possibilities left in the soul, with the fragment of time and 
the modicum of teaching ability available. It should, how- 
ever, preserve this larger, wider ken as an inspiring over- 
thought. 

For the infant, the mother, if not God Himself, is in His 
place, and there can be no better religion than this natural 
sense of love and dependence which is felt and developed 
toward the mother, turned later in life toward the heavenly 
parent. Later, the truest religion that lives in the child's soul 
is feeling for the aspects and objects of nature: dawn, twi- 
light, hills, mountains, lakes, rivers, heavenly bodies, clouds, 
rain, sun, dew, flame, heat, wind, trees, animals. Exposure 
and attunement to these, not by conscious and explicit ex- 
hortation but by way of implication and suggestion, impel the 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I39 

child onward and upward by the same way the race has as- 
cended from nature to nature's God. More or less supersti- 
tion and animism are inevitable, and are also indispensable. 
These are the matrix in which awe, reverence, and a sense of 
atonement or at-one-ment grow. The child who has adored 
and has sent wishes toward the moon will worship the unseen 
Lord of heaven and earth better later for having done so. To 
have mused in the forest and by the sea makes it easier to 
draw near to God. Solitude with nature invites the heavenly 
powers. The city child, who lacks all this first-hand com- 
munion, develops without something very basal in the edifice 
of its religious life. A religion of purely human service with- 
out this element, noble though it is, has in it at the very best 
a note of precocity. 

In seeking to solve the problem of religious education, we 
must now indicate our conception of religion. It is, in a word, 
that God is the cosmic order personified, and religion is loy- 
alty to it, or mythopoeically to Him. The divine is more than 
the power that makes for righteousness, for this limits it to 
the human world. It is also the power that makes for order, 
law, and the possibility of science. God is larger than hu- 
manity, Comte's grand etre. We must love and serve the Uni- 
verse, to use the phrase of the Stoics, as well as man. Where 
there seems conflict between the cosmic and the moral order 
in the sense of Huxley, it is because our religious instinct falls 
short of attaining its goal, which is to unify these into a larger 
whole. To a true psychology of religion, no such discord is 
conceivable. When I gaze up into the sky and say with a 
full heart, " Our Father who art in heaven," I attain thereby 
one of the chief summits of purely religious experience, for, 
psychologically interpreted, this means that I recognize my 
filial relation to the great one and all, from which my own 
being was derived through the long processes of evolution. I 
am a child by direct lineal descent from the solar system, to 
the soul of which James and Fechner say we ought to limit 
our devotion. But this smalling down of the world by prag- 
matism limits our religion, which should enable us to expatiate 
to a larger and more transcendent perspective. I am a son 
of the sky and the nebulae; thence I came, and into them I 
shall be resolved. To contemplate them is navel gazing and 



140 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

saying " Om." All other origins and destinies are proximate. 
Science also relates me phyletically with aquatic ancestors, and 
my body and soul bear many rudiments of their pedigree 
through a long train of prehuman forebears ; but my ultimate 
source is the ether or whatever was the primordial basis out 
of which the world arose. Genetic psychology is even bold 
enough to propose the hypothesis, till some better is found, 
that the reason we love the unpractical or useless study of 
astronomy is because it is an unconscious orientation of the 
soul toward both its pristine and also its ultimate home. Thus, 
we respond in the unfathomable depths of our being to the 
processes which drew us from the void, and will return us to 
it again. Only this conception makes us realize that we are 
relatives not only of animal and plant life, but of rocks, soil, 
sea, air, brothers of every element ; that all are our kin, for we 
have the same parent. Thus, evolution, even in its haziest 
chapters, comes home to the heart as a revival of true religion, 
and reveals and strengthens its ancient foundations in the soul. 
That is why we are prone to accept the development theory by 
faith where it remains still unproven. Poets of nature have 
always felt this. Moreover, there is ample space in every 
roomy soul for this dim but potent pantheistic sentiment, and 
for any and every special faith and creed beside it. Indeed, 
this fructifies and reenforces any or all of them. The fetishist 
and the Christian are both better for bathing in this cosmic 
ocean, which gives to everything good in them a wider horizon, 
a more vital interest, and an augmentated motivation. In expe- 
riencing it we commune not only with the soul of the race, past 
and present, but transcend the limitations of humanity, and 
realize that we are parts of all that ever was, is, or will be. 
The very reveries of childhood which, like so many of the 
deliverances of consciousness, rarely say what they mean are 
really far nearer to this than we dream. Happy the wise and 
most venerable sage whose most evolved consciousness has 
truly thought and seen all that the child dimly feels of this 
all-encompassing oneness which makes the world a true uni- 
verse of all that is animate and inanimate alike. 

It is this basal sanifying sense of being truly at home in 
the cosmos on which all religions rest, which the ethical cul- 
turist, in his zeal to follow Kant in evicting theological motives 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 141 

to virtue, fails to do justice to or to utilize as he should for 
conduct. He focuses his first and chief attention upon the 
nearest social duties to our fellow men, and finds pragmatic 
sanction for all these cardinal obligations. This is well, for 
most such motivations can be justified to all whose intellect is 
vigorous and cultured enough to understand the need of moral- 
ity for the ordinary conduct of life. But the aesthetic response 
to nature, as he sees and phrases it, is a faded thing compared 
with the religious response. His cult especially fails to meet 
the nature and needs of childhood and youth which must per- 
sonify and use the tropes of myth when the soul really and 
vitally acts. The young must feel that there is a veritable 
Father in Heaven with human attributes, must love and pray 
to Him as a divine parent, just as a plant must blossom and 
scatter its petals in order to bear fruit, or as the infant must 
feel love and dependence toward the mother, as above de- 
scribed, who for the time stands in the place of God, because 
toward her are directed and by her developed all of those senti- 
ments which, when transferred to a divine person, constitute 
religion. Thus, the best forms of faith always change, though 
its essence persists and increases. All this is really only re- 
ligious embryology, which is now taking its place beside the 
old and highly articulated morphology of piety, to which we 
have hitherto been too exclusively devoted. As the dominant 
interest of the child is in the world of persons, it naturally 
tends to personify all parts of and all things in the inanimate 
world, as a means of extending its zest into this wider field ; 
and, if this is forbidden in its nascent period, not only the 
child's religious nature but even its potential interest in art 
and science is dwarfed. Primitive religion largely consists in 
interpreting and adjusting to phenomena of inanimate nature, 
animistically conceived. Thus it comes that premature deper- 
sonalization is like peeling off the bracts before a bud is ready 
to blossom. Again, instead of the Hebrew being the first re- 
ligion to make for morality, as we are sometimes told, every 
primitive cult prescribed rites and forms of worship as ideal 
conduct with reference to what was thought to be supernal 
powers and with reference to some end. Ceremonious ob- 
servances align us with the divine wish or will, placate its 
anger, or win its favor. Mistaken though many religiously 



142 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

motivated acts are, the association of faith and conduct is 
nevertheless inveterate, and the instinct to connect them is so 
strong that it is wasteful to rupture them in the young. Thus, 
as the roots of all religion are found in natural phenomena, 
interest in these must be stressed with the child. He should 
live close to Nature, for he felt her in a heart-to-heart way 
long before human society, save in its crudest and most ani- 
mal relations, was much developed. Nature, religiously inter- 
preted, taught him many cardinal moral relations at a stage 
when the chief content of his soul was instinct, sentiment, and 
intuition, and long before the dawn of anything that could be 
called reason. This is the time of the Old Testament before 
the New was related to it somewhat as theologians related the 
Old to the New as being concealed in it and coming in full- 
ness of time to reveal it — this is a genetic statement of what 
the old forms of nature worship meant, and this will always 
be the Vorschule for religious pedagogy. 

The negative attitude of ethical-culture movements toward 
the religious motivation of morality is part cause and part 
effect of a lack of interest on the part of its representatives in 
the recent development of religious psychology and of their 
devotion to Kant, whose once epoch-making work in this field 
has now little more than historic interest. Like Froebelism, 
Herbartianism, and the few remaining sociological disciples of 
Comte's Politique Positive, they fail to recognize the fact that 
more detailed studies in this field have far transcended these 
ex-masters, so that adjustment and progress all along the line 
have become imperative. The spread of the culturist move- 
ment again has been greatly favored by the laicization of edu- 
cation in France, the separation of church and state in this 
country, and the secularization tendencies everywhere. Moral 
teachers have had to do the best they could under limitations, 
for these changes have made a field and need which the eth- 
icists deserve the greatest praise for making the most of. 
Their great mistake, however, has lain in denying that re- 
ligion, in domains where it can be utilized, is a most potent 
aid to virtue, and also in failing to keep abreast of the scientific 
studies of childhood and youth, which have shown how much 
more than was suspected the souls of juvenile candidates for 
mature humanity are made up, warp and woof, of what is 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I43 

really religion, although outside the narrow ecclesiastical defi- 
nitions of it which they have practically accepted from the 
church. It is this newly realized wealth and worth which 
should be cultivated by every, no matter how secularized, cur- 
riculum. As theologically conceived religion constitutes a 
perhaps dispensable element in ethical training; but in the 
vastly broader new psychological and genetic conception of 
what it is, and means, nothing is so basal, and the neglect of 
nothing so irremediable. Thus, ethical culture as organized in 
the societies of this name, enthusiastically as it must be com- 
mended for nearly all its positive achievements and endeavors, 
in its negative phases is reactionary and one-sided because it 
persists, against the better insight now attainable, in separat- 
ing faith and conduct which God and nature have indissolubly 
joined. 

Before stating what we deem the fundamental principles 
of ethnic religious education, it is necessary to distinguish 
clearly between the pedagogic and the scientific point oi view. 
The religion of the adult cultivated male intellect may be 
roughly characterized somewhat as follows: 

(a) The highest personifications within its ken are the best 
men and women now living. To personify the divine, means 
to impose human limitations upon it, and we must from this 
point of view no longer regard either objects, groups of phe- 
nomena, or the cosmos itself animistically. All gods are pro- 
jections of the individual or the racial soul, or of both. The- 
ology is transcendental anthropology. To reason and science, 
the world and the powers that rule it are dwarfed and dis- 
torted if cast in any personal mold. To be sure, the heart and 
the imagination, whenever deeply stirred, respond instinctively 
by the af^rmation of personality, just as the optic nerve, how- 
ever excited, whether chemically, thermally, haptically, or 
photocally, responds according to the law of specific energy, 
only by the sensation of light. This is the reaction of the 
deeper, older strata of our nature. Men may conceive their 
own tribe or race as a sufifering and triumphing person like 
the Messiah of the Hebrew prophets. We may also more com- 
prehensively apprehend humanity itself as a collective per- 
sonality, of which all individuals are organs, cells, or fibers in 
it ; or we may postulate a still more poetic soul of the cosmos 



144 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

itself. But these are ideals. The only real persons are people, 
to serve whom is the only true service to God. Hence, all 
divine authority is really inward, and by rising to this purview 
alone can the sage become free from all the repressions due to 
external constraints or impulsions. The most imperative voice 
in the world is the inner oracle of conscience. We approach 
the Divine by self-communion and intuition. There are no 
sacrifices save those of the baser elements of our own nature, 
and no objects of worship save the best that is in man. There 
is no litany or ritual save good thoughts, feelings, deeds, and 
good will. Thus, we reach the insight that the only true re- 
ligious growth is inwardization. The powers that make for 
good and evil are not angels or demons, but are in us. Rev- 
elation is the opening of still more interior chambers in our 
own souls, and we are inspired when the best latent elements 
there become patent. When we listen to and obey these inner 
admonitions, we are true children of the Divine. This resolu- 
tion of the objectivities of religion into subjectivities brings 
with it a profound sense of self-pity that we have thought so 
meanly of our nature and its possibility when, in fact, we can- 
not begin to think half highly enough of it. Thus, we inter- 
nalize all the ejects of the soul by a blind but sound pragmatic 
or pedagogic instinct. Objectivity is, of course, easiest to 
grasp, and more effective for conduct with the masses than 
this subjectivization. 

(b) We have no convincing proof that can for a moment 
satisfy the canons of logic of the existence of revenient spirits, 
or even of the post-mortem perduration of personality. Our 
supreme mundane duty is to develop our own physical and 
psychic personality to its uttermost, or, in a word, to make 
the very most and best of ourselves in this life, and to find 
sufficient earthly motives for virtue and against sin within our- 
selves and our environment. A morality that needs rewards 
and punishments in another life is immature, artificial, and 
falsetto. To be influenced by the fear of pain or the lust for 
pleasure in an eternal beyond is at bottom only selfishness and 
Hedonism in a vaster field. All true rewards and penalties 
are inward, and to the fully evolved soul these are adequate. 
No real evil can befall a good man, living or dead, if he is 
true and loyal to himself. If there be a future life beyond the 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I45 

range of all our arguments, the best preparation for it is to 
forget it here and now, and to live out our present life day by 
day as completely and purely as possible. 

(c) All mediatorial functions are for undeveloped souls. 
If a bad man becomes good it is by no external ceremonial. 
Churches are infirmaries and sacraments are orthopedic de- 
vices for the crippled and deformed, and priests are physicians 
for the sickly or teachers for the spiritually immature. Com- 
merce of the soul with the Divine is direct and immediate. 
Ecclesiastical functions are valuable only so far as they intro- 
duce men to powers within themselves that were undeveloped ; 
they are psychotherapeutic methods, the end of which is to 
stimulate inadequate powers. 

It is religion, rather than the external world, as epistemol- 
ogists have so long urged, that chiefly needs to be inwardized. 
Philosophic idealism expressed a profound instinct, but mis- 
carried because it mistook its field and object. Just in pro- 
portion, thus, as religion strikes in and takes the form of 
interior realization and edification, do all its externals, having 
accomplished their end, become deciduous or desiccate to bar- 
ren formulae. They have worth just so far as they stimulate 
this inner growth, which is their substance, while all else is 
shadow. Dogma is to evoke intuition, which then supersedes 
it. Penance and oblations are symbols of sloughing off our 
baser selves. Prayers are paradigms of aspiration for a higher 
life and for unity with the great all. Confession is a form of 
extradition of evil. The Eucharist is a type of reconsecration 
to the service of suffering and exalted humanity. Redeemers 
are great moral and religious geniuses who help feebler folk 
to realize the higher potentialities of the kingdom of man's 
soul. Regeneration is an exceptionally rapid transition from 
the crass and animal basis of human life up toward the ideal 
of the spiritual man. Revelation is inner truth that is first 
presented objectively to be appropriated and absorbed. It is 
something like this that has always been the religion of the 
great souls who live among the altitudes of thought, and it is 
also the religion of the future, although only for the few, 
though let us hope steadily increasing number, of such souls. 

This rudely sketches the religion of the intellect solicitous 
only for truth as science defines it. It is not for leaders, but 
11 



146 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

for those who have reached the last stage of reHgioiis evohi- 
tion and are ideally senescent, having attained the final stage 
of the Protestant revolt. In contrast with this the life of the 
heart is inconceivably older and nearer to the Silurian ages. 
It can never live without its aesthetics of worship. It is be- 
cause genetic psychology now shows that, imperatively as san- 
ity and plasticity require us to live palpitatingly in and close 
to the present, to occupy ourselves chiefly with its duties, as 
the Neo-Christians exhort us to do, it also recognizes as the 
world has not seen before that wherever the emotions are in- 
volved we still live in and through the past, and that the roots 
of our being strike down toward the beginnings of life. 
Recognizing thus fully the claims of a religion of pure reason, 
we can now realize more fully than ever before that man has 
fundamental pragmatic or pedagogic needs that this can never 
meet. The two points of view differ toto ccelo, and so do their 
methods, but not only are they not inconsistent, but each is 
indispensable to the other. Nothing is so historic as the soul 
in the sense that in each of us it lives and ranges through all 
ages, and the error of logic is in its superficial concept of con- 
sistency and its failure to see that, while the domain of science 
and reason must be everywhere advanced, the mind must not 
in doing this lose temporal perspective. 

Now it is in the advocacy of the above most advanced con- 
cepts of religion fit for the mature or post-mature intellect, 
but not for the young, that we have only another illustration 
of the many to be cited in this volume of the decadence of the 
pedagogic spirit in this country which is without parallel in 
history. From the old New England catechism to President 
Eliot's latest pronouncements reducing religion to ethical cul- 
ture, American educators have to an extraordinary degree ig- 
nored the nature and the higher needs of the child, and per- 
sistently assumed that whatever was good for them was, of 
course, good for him. No wonder such leaders think meanly 
of pedagogy and paidology as academic topics, or that teach- 
ers, so quick to catch the animus of the college and the uni- 
versity, still hold these topics in light esteem. Hence, it is at 
this point that we must briefly glance at some of the modern 
causes and consequences of this national loss of right contact 
with childhood. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i47 

This has many sad ilkistrations. There are now some two 
milHon childless homes in this country. Houses and flats are 
built with no nurseries or other provisions for children, and 
landlords often discriminate against them. A large and grow- 
ing proportion of mothers cannot or will not nurse their off- 
spring, and without the performance of this function mother- 
hood is always incomplete. In Greater New York alone the 
Gerry Society reports some fifteen thousand children that are 
annually brought to their attention because of parental cruelty 
or neglect. Statistics show that for the large and growing 
percentage of divorces the existence of children is less often 
a bar than in other lands. The young here are earlier eman- 
cipated from parental control and more often feralized in 
gangs, and hoodlumism is more common. Precocity in those 
respects which can be estimated is more common. Parents, 
especially of only children, are overindulgent, oversolicitous, 
and often bring their darlings up according to fads and whims 
which sadly interfere with nature. Teachers rep'ort that par- 
ents of foreign birth show much more interest in the school 
and more pride in having their children do well than do native- 
born parents. Again, the cultured classes marry late or not 
at all, and have few children. American fathers of the middle 
and upper classes leave the children, even the boys in the teens, 
to the mothers' care, and, as school teachers are mostly women, 
feminine influence predominates at an age when boys most 
need fatherly and male control. Child-labor laws are still often 
hard on children, and in some states the age of consent, despite 
great reforms, in this respect remains deplorably low. Once 
more, we are immeasurably behind many other lands in the 
matter of good toys for children, and really know little of the 
vast variety and the highly educative influence these can exert 
over them. In the matter of pictures adapted to childhood, 
especially wall pictures helpful in school work, we are unde- 
veloped. A goodly fraction of our population are born and 
reared, at least in part, abroad, and come to our shores already 
beyond the age when they contribute to the volume of child 
life. Tributary to this same sad loss of instinctive and sym- 
pathetic appreciation of childhood and its naivete is the fact 
that we are a new country, and our history does not go back 
to aboriginal stages. Such historic contact as our children get 



148 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

with primitive life is by the study of the Indian, who is essen- 
tially of the stone age, and between whom and us there is a 
great chasm of development, to say nothing of mutual enmity, 
so that this contributes its moiety to weaken our genetic sense. 
Our schools are very advanced in all that pertains to the regi- 
mentation of children, to setting and hearing lessons, marking, 
and all that is material, formal, and mechanical ; but the Amer- 
ican teacher usually does not and cannot really teach as does 
the German teacher. Just as the knight-errants in the days of 
chivalry knew, because he lived with and on him, his horse, 
which we know only from a driver's seat or through the coach- 
man, so the American parent and teacher once knew the child 
from close, vital contact, but now each knows only certain 
aspects of the child's life. Still further, the aging are crowded 
out and the juveniles forced into positions which they are not 
ripe for. Life for grown ups is so intensely absorbing that 
men and women easily and completely forget what it meant 
even to themselves to be a child, and cannot wait for nature to 
develop their own offspring. Children stretch and tiptoe up, 
eager to be men and women, and often become so prematurely, 
and hence often incompletely, although they save time there- 
by; for all growth, whether of cereals, men, cities, nations, is 
interesting here only when it is phenomenally rapid. As the 
young often affect maturity, so the aged are prone to affect 
youth, because all want to get quickly to the stage of maximal 
efficiency and to remain there as long as possible. Our love 
of children is too often that of the auntie, the grandmother, or 
the doting bachelor uncle, rather than that of the normal par- 
ent. We constrain the child to try to think and reason before 
it is able to do so, and hence neglect the nascent stage of drill, 
habituation, and discipline, just as we make him write so early 
that penmanship is later a crippled thing, and give him fine 
sedentary work, even in the kindergarten, and so bring symp- 
toms of chorea when the larger muscles should be chiefly 
trained. Thus, we see that it is only one, if a culminating, 
error that we make when we try to train the child to skip too 
many of the stages of recapitulation and become a moral sage 
like the noble Stoic philosopher, or an ethical pundit, and base 
conduct upon intelligent and infinitely complex knowledge of 
society and his manifold relations to it and of human nature 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i49 

at a stage when religion was meant to be the chief of all moral- 
izing agencies. 

Thus, to summarize, the problem of religious education for 
children can be solved only by looking primarily at their 
nature and their needs. Religion is for the child rather than 
the child for religion. Never in history has an age so lost 
touch with childhood, in home, school, church, as our own, 
which is doing so much for inculcation and indoctrination 
with prepared culture. Until the recent child renaissance be- 
gan, which promises to better all this, it was religion and 
health that suffered most of all. Some break the infant soul 
prematurely into the literature, rites, and even the creeds of 
adults. Others would rob it of its own natural religion by 
attempting to exorcise it as superstition. All failed to see that 
the child must be a good pagan, suckled in creeds that adults 
have outgrown, or else its religious and moral nature will be 
lamed and sickly through all later life. Philosophical systems 
from Locke, down, so carefully summarized by Lyon,^ shed 
hardly a ray of light here. Worse even than their pedagogic 
methods is the spirit which most of the Sunday-school experts 
— ^Protestant, Jewish, and Catholic in almost equal degree, 
though in different ways — show, in tearing the embryonic soul 
from its very placenta of superstitious nature worship, in which 
it should be left to ripen for due season. It is because we flay 
instead of awaiting normal moults that the juvenile mind so 
early becomes sore and raw with consciousness on religious 
matters, or else with premature inculcations which, according 
to an iron law, tend to become encystments too tough to be shed, 
and so work their havoc. He or she who has never been a 
true child in religious matters will never become a full-grown 
man or woman. And hence come the common stigmata of 
infantilism in this function. Just as the Freud school shows 
that precocious sexuality or especially assaults tend tO' impair 
all the psychic functions of marital and parental life, so ques- 
tionnaire returns abound in analogous results due to forcing 
religious activities before their time. It has often been asked 
of late whether the child can survive modern civilization which 



* Lyon, Georges, Enseignement et Religion; Etudes Philosophiques, Alcan, 
Paris, 1907, 237 p. 



ISO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

at so many points is so hard on it. Many perfervid inculcators 
are so devoid of sympathy into, and so ilhterate on, childhood 
that if they had their way the sweet, natural religion, which 
is the psychoplasm out of which true piety of every ilk and 
name is made, would in a few generations be as nearly eradi- 
cated as anything with such vast momentum of heredity be- 
hind it can be. So invincible is their sense that what is good 
per se or for them is of course good for the child, so fanatical 
their instinct of indoctrination, so prone are they to regard 
religion as an infection or conquest rather than a growth, so 
ignorant are they of the very existence of paidology, from the 
standpoint of which a man may hold all the above views and 
be at the same time a devotee of any creed or sect, that they 
are still sometimes prone to sling the mud of religious intoler- 
ance at a plain, hard-working devotee of the science of the 
child by dubbing him as some kind of an ist, or arian, or ologist, 
or to otherwise raise the old " hep " or hue and cry of heretic 
or sceptic. In this tendency we sometimes see, even in our 
own day, the attenuated relic of the bigotry and fanaticism 
that made the old religious persecution. Said an eminent Sun- 
day-school worker, an authority in such matters as roll calls, 
rewards of merit, picnics, records, departments, chalk talks, 
and sermonettes, a man gifted in conducting child prayer meet- 
ings and revivals : " We care not what the child is by nature. 
We are interested only in what it can be made by grace. No 
matter what it is, the one and only great fact that concerns us is 
that the divine spirit can transmute its nature, and thus save 
its soul from eternal death. Until gathered into the true fold, 
all are children of the evil one, and not of God. Thus, we 
should save rather than study them," Thus, as the noble 
ideals of chivalry could degenerate to the level of a Don Quix- 
ote, so the Holy Ghost itself can have doughty, wooden-souled 
knights ready to joust against anything natural, and it is a 
new proof of the vitality of religion and of its power to in- 
fluence life for the better that, despite all such aberrations, we 
still believe in this function of it. 

On the other hand, we have happily passed beyond the 
smug complacency of the days when uniformity was the chief 
inspiration, and when " eight million American children and 
adults studying Abraham's sacrifice at the same time " consti- 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 151 

tutecl " the most sublime and reassuring fact in the universe," 
when " a batch of cheap songs by cheap amateurs were 
whacked up for each lesson," and prayer was the best prepara- 
tion a teacher could make. The uniformitarian movement 
left, however, as its most precious legacy the ideal of a union 
of at least all Protestant denominations in this work, which is 
still bearing good fruit, for sectarian differences are not for 
childhood. Now we find at the other extreme the movement 
to emulate, and even outdo, the public school in elaborate 
gradations in departments and classes, one scheme being to 
have a complete series of lessons for every year between the 
ages of six and twenty-one. Some even suggest salaried 
teachers, tuition fees from pupils, written examinations for 
promotion, records, prizes, diplomas, and professional super- 
intendence ; while others demand Sunday-school chairs in the- 
ological seminaries that clergymen may be qualified to take a 
greater and more intelligent interest in the Sunday-school. 
One eminent leader pleads for the endowment of a national 
Sunday-school university; another urges that large Sunday- 
schools have classes for defective and subnormal children. 
One wishes a special Sunday-school ritual and a system of 
sponsors, and proposes prizes for the best sermonettes and 
model prayers for children, and volunteer tutors for those that 
are backward or retarded as a mode of special coaching. 
Another would revive the catechism and have printed questions 
and answers with proof texts to be memorized. 

Meanwhile, but a few years have passed since Prof. Her- 
bert B. Adams, after an elaborate summary, told us that 
" America is probably one of the most backward countries in 
the Protestant world as regards intelligent historical and lit- 
erary study of the Bible." ^ The ineffectiveness of our re- 
ligious training is strikingly brought out by several sets of 
statistics, showing that a varying but always large majority 
of the inmates of juvenile reformatories, as of adults in jails 
and prisons, were once Sunday-school scholars; and also by 
the presentments of President Thwing.^ He found that less 

^ Adams, H. B., Church and Popular Education. Johns Hopkins Univ. Studies 
in Hist, and Pol. Sci., 1900, ser. 18, Nos. 8-9, 84 p. 

^ Thwing, C. F., Significant Ignorance about the Bible as Shown Among College 
Students of Both Sexes. Century, May, 1900, vol. 38, pp. 123-28. 



152 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

than half of the plain Biblical allusions in a set of passages 
from Tennyson were understood, and found reason to believe 
the same was true of Browning. Indeed, English literature 
has developed in very close relations with the Bible, which is 
a key to much of it. Small as the number of students here 
tested is, the author gives reason for believing that his results 
are typical for our academic youth, and ascribes this neglect 
of Scripture to multiplication of other printed matter (seven 
to ten thousand volumes being published annually in this coun- 
try, to say nothing of the rising tide of periodical literature 
and the daily press, and the special Sunday-school publica- 
tions, which are legion), to the decline of family life and 
prayers which the Sunday-school has not compensated for, and 
to the decay of Sabbath observance. Very hopeful of better 
things, however, is the growing insight among the advanced 
Sunday-school men and women, that everything here must 
take its cue from the child. This at least gives the right ori- 
entation. The Rev. J. L. Hurlburt says : " The study of 
the child is in our day the subject to which the greatest teach- 
ers and the greatest teachers of teachers are devoting their 
best energy. No book on teaching is of value that omits or 
treats carelessly this important department." ^ M. C. Brown ^ 
says : " From the child-study point of view the child, like the 
race, must ordinarily pass through the more elementary stages 
of spiritual growth." C, L. Drawbridge ^ bases his hope of 
escape from the fact that now "the whole thing (Sunday- 
school work) is a confused jumble in children's minds," for 
the new scientific knowledge we are relying on the child. G. 
H. Archibald ^ says : " I am not unmindful that genetic psy- 
chology, commonly called child study, is yet in its infancy, 
but enough has been revealed already of the nature of the 
child, enough that is definite and final, to show to the teacher 
of religion and morals the need there is for him to change 
his plan of organization, to reform his methods of teaching, 

' The Introduction to A. H. McKinney's Bible School Pedagogy. Eaton & 
Mains, N. Y., 1900, 78 p. 

^Sunday-school Movements in America. Revell, N. Y., 1901, 269 p. 

^ Religious Education, How to Improve It. Longmans, Lond., 1906, 222 p. 

* The Sunday-school of To-morrow. The Sunday-school Union, London, 
1909, p. 7 and p. 103 et seq. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I53 

and enable him to follow the line of least resistance. . . . 
The children have been subjected to adult requirements, and 
everything, so far as they are concerned, has had to give way 
to adult conveniences. But this must be changed. When the 
members of the church, the adult church, come to see their 
duty, when, because of failure, they are forced to inquire into 
the cause of decay and seriously examine the nature and needs 
of the children, these things will be changed, and church 
buildings, church schools, etc., will be adapted to the needs of 
the children and youth. 

Says J. S. Kornfeld,^ " the radical defect in our Bible 
teaching lies in our total indifference to the power of a child's 
apperception," and even the Religious Education Association 
seeks to bring about in the Sunday-school " an adaptation of 
the material method of instruction to the several stages of the 
mental, moral, and spiritual growth of the individual." But, 
alas ! Is there any class of people save promoters of new finan- 
cial projects who so divorce prospectus and theory from facts 
as teachers? How often do we hear the most alluring peda- 
gogic ideals from educators who violate in their own practice 
every principle they advocate in public ! Perhaps the vacation 
and convention moods atone for practices that are sometimes 
vicious or else vent aspirations that are useful only in keeping 
up courage in work handicapped by difficulties and traditions 
that would otherwise be intolerable. The whole church will 
one day be organized on this new basis, and its members in 
council will look back with wonder and pity upon the dark 
ages of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, when the 
church was buried in formalism and self-complacency, and the 
children were overlooked and forgotten. We can now profit, 
if we have no phobia for things " made in Germany," by the 
remarkable pedagogic organization of religious education for 
children there.^ 

The belief in the absolute and literal truthfulness and final- 
ity of the Bible often makes of the Book of Books a pedagogic 
incubus and monstrosity. It is, as Moulton says, the worst- 

^ Bible in the Sunday-school. The Open Court, August, 1909, vol. 23, pp. 476- 

483. 

^ See an admirable presentation of this subject for each German State, by 
Guttler, Wilhelm : Die religiose Kindererziehung im Deutschen Reiche, 1908, 331 p. 



154 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

printed book in the world, with sins unnumbered against the 
hygiene of the eye ; but it is also, as Kornfeld urges, the worst 
taught of all books, and, as I would add, the most grossly 
misunderstood. To eliminate it from education, as the secular 
schools do, is as preposterous pedagogically as it would have 
been in the days of Plato to taboo Homer in the education of 
the Greek youth. It is not only a model of English, translated 
just at that period and in just the way that make it one of 
the best monuments in our language of direct, simple, forcible 
Saxon style, but it is impossible to understand the culture his- 
tory of any country of Europe without it, as it has influenced 
the literature, history, and the life of the Western nations as 
no other book has begun to do. Now that we have a new 
historical revelation of it by the higher criticism, this out- 
rageous abuse should cease. The best myth is philosophy 
pedagogically adapted to the young, and philosophy is only 
myth written and revealed in terms of the adult intellect. The 
child feels the full force of Grimm's " Marchen," of the 
" Niebelungenlied," the " Arthuriad," the " Iliad," and the 
" Odyssey," without torturing his mind at every step with the 
priggish and insistent question whether the incidents and he- 
roes are objectively and historically true, as our methods have 
taught him to do regarding Scripture. Thus, the essential truth 
is missed, and its unique edification miscarries. Again, every 
act and word of both Jehovah and Jesus was exactly and ex- 
quisitely adapted to the immediate environment and occasion 
which invoked it. The prophets attempted little prediction, 
but were occupied chiefly in interpreting the present optimistic- 
ally even in the hardest of hard times. As a whole, Scripture 
is a masterpiece of adjustment, of making the best and most 
of events as they arose. Hence, it follows that there is much 
that is unfitted to the individual or to the life of to-day, so 
that expurgation is needed. But this done, the remainder, 
fitly printed, arranged and understood, should be taught to 
every child as an inalienable birthright. Even its miraculous 
records are mostly, as now interpreted, psycho-pedagogic 
chefs-d'oeuvre of unique power, into all the higher meanings 
of which their symbols unfold as the soul ripens to maturity. 
Thus, there is no such text-book of both the higher anthropol- 
ogy of races and of genetic psychology showing how the indi- 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I55 

vidual expands and approximates the dimensions of the ethnic 
consciousness. 

This brings me to my special theme. One of the best edu- 
cational signs of the times is a growing sense of the importance 
of the Sabbath-school and the greatly increased attention given 
to all methods of religious training for childhood and youth. 
Perhaps never have the limitations of the Sunday-school, at 
least in the way of scant professional training for teachers as 
well as in time and attendance, been more keenly felt or the 
demand for an improvement upon existing methods been more 
urgent than now. This is seen in many new tentative methods 
and schemes ; some by scholars which usually lack adaptation ; 
others by nonexperts animated by zeal and love of imparting 
the blessings of religion to childhood, but liable to lack in 
knowledge or pedagogical quality. Those of us who are in 
quest of something better ought first of all to pay the heartiest 
tribute of gratitude to all those who have contributed to cur- 
rent systems, which were an immeasurable advance over those 
which preceded them, and I wish first of all to say with the 
greatest earnestness that, if in some of the positions taken here 
I differ from present usages, it is not without a profound 
sense of gratitude and obligation to' previous workers, and 
with the recognition that it is their work that has made fur- 
ther progress imperative or even possible. 

As a special teacher and student of the human soul as well 
as of education, religious teaching has long been a center of 
interest, and several of my best students have at my sug- 
gestion published careful and comprehensive studies of differ- 
ent aspects of the subject.^ Indeed, psychology presents a new 
standpoint in looking, as I have said, primarily at the nature, 
needs, and power of the growing soul of childhood during its 

^ The New Life: A Study of Regeneration, by Arthur H. Daniels. Amer. 
Jour, of Psych., Oct., 1893, vol. 6, pp. 61-106. Sunday-School Work and Bible 
Study in the Light of Modern Pedagogy, by A. Caswell Ellis. Ped. Sem., June, 
1896, vol. 3, pp. 363-412. Psychology and Pedagogy of Adolescence, by E. G. 
Lancaster. Ped. Sem., July, 1897, vol. 5, pp. 61-128. Children's Interest in the 
Bible, by George E. Dawson. Ped. Sem., July, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 151-178. The 
Pedagogical Bible School, by Samuel B. Haslett, New York. F. H. Revell Co., 
1903, 383 p. A Genetic Study of Veracity, by Edward Porter St. John. Ped. 
Sem., June, 1908, vol. 15, pp. 246-270. The Rehgion of Childhood, by J. R. 
Street. Homiletic Review, May, 1908, vol. 55, pp. 371-375. 



156 



EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 



successive stages, and in basing- methods upon this knowledge. 
In what follows, the writer must seek indulgence if occasion- 
ally in the interest of brevity he seems sometimes dogmatic. 



BOYS' CHOICE 
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COMPARATIVE CHOICE, AMONG BOYS, OF BIBLE ■ 
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AGE 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 16 16 17 18 19 20 AGE 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 
CHARACTERS. STORIES. SCENES. CHARACTERS. STORIES. SCENES. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 157 







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BOYS. GIRLS. 



The purpose is to define a few fundamental principles that rest 
upon solid psycho-pedagogical foundations, and to plead for 
such modifications in present methods, text-books, etc., as are 
necessary to conform to them. I know of no previous at- 
tempts, unless in part some of those just referred to, to appeal 
to the principle of psycho-genesis in this field, and while the 
following attempt no doubt shares the limitations of all first 
efforts in new directions in a great field, I have slowly grown 
to have much confidence in the principles below, as resting 
upon solid psycho-pedagogical foundations, according to which 
I think all methods, text-books, and helps should be made. 

I. The Old Testament should predominate over the New 
for boys and girls before the dawn of adolescence. This by 
no means excludes instruction in matters pertaining to the New 
Testament, but it is a matter of relative time and energy. I 
know of no scheme of Bible work that has recognized this 
principle, which is very plain from our present knowledge of 



IS8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the characteristics of the different stages of youthful develop- 
ment. Although this had been repeatedly said before, it was 
reserved for Prof. George E. Dawson to supply statistical 
data.^ He circulated some 14,000 questionnaires, and from the, 
it must be confessed, all too meager returns he received, con- 
structed a curve of the interests of American Evangelical Sun- 
day-school children, from which it appears that, at the age of 
eight, some sixty per cent of the boys and seventy-two per cent 
of the girls are more interested in the New Testament than in 
the Old. About a year later the lines cross, indicating equal 
interest, and from thence interest in the New Testament de- 
clines till a minimum of thirty-two per cent is reached for 
boys at fourteen, and for girls thirty per cent at twelve, 
after which the New Testament interest increases steadily at 
least to the age of twenty, where his census ends. The preced- 
ing curves of interest, on pp. 156 and 157, explain themselves. 
It is a cardinal principle of pedagogy that interest is the 
best index of capacity or pedagogical ripeness. It is, like 
hunger, an expression of need. Literature abounds in illustra- 
tions of the vastly greater rapidity and ease of every kind of 
education when interest is enlisted, and of the superficial and 
even health-destroying effect of knowledge forced on minds 
deficient in interest. While shallow interests can be easily gen- 
erated by adults, whose inevitable weakness it is to mistake 
the semblance for the thing, the deeper, more irrepressible in- 
stincts that need no solicitation are the only organs of true 
apperception and of permanent acquisition. The nascent sea- 
sons, when the soul is ripe for the impregnation of sacred 
truth, which are now being determined for the various secular 
studies as all conditioning and dominant, are the seasons of 
the efflorescence of interests. Interest is the first manifestation 
of superior talent and genius, to follow which leads to emi- 
nence and to neglect which makes children commonplace and 
monotonously uniform as well as chronically fatigued. For 
pedagogy, indeed, interest is a word which looms up almost 
like the mighty word faith for the Christian. Nor is it psy- 
chologically unlike faith in its generic, but is so only in its 
specific qualities. It predisposes to knowledge, insight, and 

^Children's Interest in the Bible. Ped. Sem., July, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 151-178. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 159 

belief, and each stage of childhood and youdi is marked by its 
own set of dominant interests or " nascent periods," to neg"lect 
which is almost like grieving and sinning away the visitations 
of the Holy Spirit. 

To teach the young we must go to them and take them as 
they are, understanding their weakness, limitations, and igno- 
rance with the deepest sympathy; we must turn our backs 
resolutely upon the standpoint of the adult and not offend the 
little ones. If the burning words of Jesus suggesting the fit 
penalty for those who do so were a sentence to be literally 
executed, millstones would be in great demand. " Daniel in 
the Lions' Den " was the most attractive scene in all the Bible 
to boys, who associated him with lion tamers in menageries, 
with Daniel Boone, etc. David and Goliath thrills the boyish 
heart because it is a fight ending in blood, and the victory of 
the smaller but better man, and because the sling interest cul- 
minates at that age. Many boys, as they confess, are inter- 
ested in the crucifixion at this age because it is an execution, 
and they bring to it some of the same zest with which they 
read the newspaper columns of hangings and murders. Sam- 
son, the Hebrew Hercules, is an especial favorite when the 
athletic pulse begins to beat high just before the teens, and the 
romance of Joseph's life appeals to them far more deeply than 
that of the precociously pious Samuel. The incidents in the 
lives of Abraham, Moses, Saul, David, Joshua, Balaam, Elijah, 
Elisha, and Jacob; manna and the quails; the brazen serpent, 
and later, stories of Ahab, Jonah, Ruth, Esther ; Cain and Abel 
as illustrating the agricultural and the pastoral stage ; the cap- 
tivity and return, some of the prophets, some items of the law, 
awaken interest in an order yet to be more definitely and 
minutely determined. 

Children of this age lead a life eminently objective; they 
look outward, and should not be encouraged to look inward. 
They love exciting events, battles, the flood and tower. They 
admire character, for this is an age of intense hero worship, 
and interest in persons is necessary to animate interest in 
causes, ideas, all geographical localities, ceremonials, etc. It 
is the age, too, of justice; all studies of the rules of games 
show that the ideals of fair play are never higher or stronger. 
Boy punishment for overstepping the law of justice is remorse- 



i6o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

less and sometimes cruel, as were Jehovah's. The sense of 
law looms up in human life long before that of the Gospel. 
The Old Testament, too, has a far greater variety of striking 
events, a greater wealth of history, a larger repertory of per- 
sons, dramatic and romantic incidents. Moreover, this is the 
stage of life when the boy, who repeats and recapitulates in 
his development the entire life of the race, is at the same stage 
in which Old Testament events live, move, and have their be- 
ing. Fear, anger, jealousy, hate, revenge, but not yet love, 
are strong and often dominant. The lower motive powers of 
human nature, which furnish the mainsprings of life, are now 
being developed, and the age for unfolding the higher powers, 
which control and direct these aright, has not yet come. The 
more we come to understand the real nature and interests of 
boy life; how this period is preeminently the age of drill and 
discipline and, if so dangerous a word might be used, of a 
higher animality, egoism and selfishness, when currents of 
support, knowledge, and guidance all flow to the child, and 
the sense of earthly, may gradually emerge into one of a heav- 
enly, parentage that is wise, somewhat stern and not precipi- 
tately longing to forgive, not too easily swayed by petitions 
or tears, if ever so vague, nevertheless giving a kind of 
resonator reenforcement to parental authority, wise enough to 
compel acquiescence at least in the depths of the soul, and, 
even though training may seem severe, with hope and trust at 
the bottom — the more we shall realize that the nature and 
needs of this boy stage of life are so well met in the Old Testa- 
ment that they actually supply a new and very cogent con- 
firmation and proof of its supreme pedagogical quality and 
essential truth, which has never yet been recognized. 

We have long been taught that the Old Testament pre- 
pares for the New; that what lay concealed in the former 
stands revealed in the latter, but in our Bible teaching we have 
not only ignored this obvious fact and confused the two with- 
out any reason, but have sometimes reversed this law as if 
the New Testament were the only introduction to the Old. 
We are told that Christ came in the fullness of time, but our 
Sunday-school authorities would seem to imply that he made 
a mistake which they must correct, and in this they violate a 
cardinal principle of Christianity itself. Again, the old Testa- 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i6i 

ment is taught as full of prelusions and prophetic anticipations 
of something higher ; in exactly the same way boyhood is per- 
meated with premonitions of the great new birth of adoles- 
cence, and in this respect the Old Testament prepares for the 
New. All this is true whether we interpret the Old Testament 
literally as old or allow the new higher criticism, which gives 
such different interpretation of the stages of development of 
Jehovah worship and the rise and function of prophecy. The 
Old Testament is the most vivid and complete picture of the 
development of the moral and religious consciousness of the 
race; here the Semitic mind most exceeds the Aryan, and it 
affords a wide and pedagogic proportion of immanence and 
transcendence. It stimulates profoundly the sentiments of awe 
and reverence on which religion rests in the human soul and 
which precede the dawn of the altruistic impulses. Hence, 
while the prophecies are not yet appreciated, Job and the wis- 
dom books and Psalms not fully comprehended, and therefore 
should not receive the chief stress of instruction, their influence 
should be felt and is deeply formative.^ 

II. The second and somewhat complementary principle is 
that the New Testament is chiefly for adolescence. Jesus was 
animated by the great principle of love and self-sacrifice, and 
these motives cannot be comprehended by the mind or deeply 
felt by the heart until the dawn of that great physical regen- 
eration, when love takes up the harp of life and smites on all 
the chords at once, the very recent study of which from so 
many points of view marks an important epoch in our knowl- 
edge of the development of the human soul. To understand 
the broad and deep import of this principle, it is necessary to 
have some knowledge of writers like Marro, Lancaster, Burn- 

^ Many, says J. E. Mercer (Is the Old Testament a Suitable Basis for Moral 
Instruction? Hibbert Journal, January, 1909, vol. 7, pp. 333-345) refuse to al- 
low the existence of moral difficulties in the Old Testament or dissolve them in the 
glow and fervor of unquestioning faith, while others if pressed admit difficulties 
but think it wiser to let sleeping dogs lie. The fitness of the Old Testament as a 
basis for moral instruction is certainly open to grave question. Jesus often referred 
to it but to contrast its immaturity with his own higher teaching. We must beware 
of relapsing to the lower morality of old codes and in many respects certainly that 
of the ancient Hebrews was inferior to our own. We cannot worship to-day the 
Old Testament Jehovah for both moral and intellectual grounds. The higher 
criticism does not relieve the situation. 
13 



i62 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ham, Leuba, Starbuck, Coe, and perhaps a score of others, who 
have so recently contributed to this great turning point of hfe 
from the predominance of ego-centric to ahro-centric motives. 
Into this I cannot enter here.-^ Sufhce it to say that boys be- 
fore twelve or fourteen have normally little real interest in 
the character, life, or teachings of Jesus, and it is a bad sign 
if they do. There is little in their souls that responds to the 
Gospel. Here again it is easy to work up a superficial interest 
as a Sunday-school artifact, but this is because of the long 
historic and instinctive subjection of child to adult life. The 
danger is that precocious interest in Jesus will result in con- 
ceptions of His character and work that will dwarf more ade- 
quate ideas later, and that a premature interest in Him will 
interfere with the great deepening and enlargement of the 
affectional nature which the early teens bring. Juvenile piety 
in any drastic sense is always a dangerous thing. Boy Chris- 
tians illustrate John Stuart Mill's description of very early 
risers who are conceited all the forenoon and dull all the after- 
noon and cross all the evening. Much current Sunday-school 
inculcation is psycho-pedagogically analogous to trying to 
teach boys of this age the nature and responsibilities of mar- 
ried life. Precocious training before the advent of its proper 
nascent period is always open to two grave objections : the 
first, that it is a waste of time to teach by labored methods 
what would come of itself later; and, second, it leads to a 
preformation and preoccupation of both heart and brain that 
rub the bloom, zest, and force off these subjects, so that when 
the time is ripe they seem stale or deflowered of interest, and 
are met with indifference and ennui. Third, and worst of all, 
narrow childish images, conceptions, and thought forms are 
already developed and made so hard and rigid by the great 
sense of the importance of the subject that their transformation 
is difTficult. Who has not been struck by the falsetto notes in 
prayer meeting and in descriptions of religious experiences, 
which remind us of the old reading-book poem of " Orator 
Puff," with two tones to his voice? It is the calamity of 
Christianity that its ideas and experiences are too often char- 
acterized by notes of infantilism due to arrested religious de- 

1 See this point explained in my Adolescence, vol. 2, chap. xiv. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 163 

velopment. Just as we can spoil hand writing by forcing it 
too early, and condemn to life-long school tricks, like finger 
counting, by laying too early stress on arithmetic, etc., so in 
religious instruction there are the same dangers, but vastly 
greater and more calamitous. 

No doubt some children can be taught to love Jesus as a 
kindly, sympathetic being very early in life, and at puberty 
this sentiment can be normally deepened and broadened with- 
out any radical change of nature, but child piety is another and 
very dangerous thing. Children have a strong animal and 
even vegetable nature, upon the full development of which in 
its season as much depends as upon the growth of the stalk 
which is to bear the flower and fruit, the foundations for the 
house, or the fundamental- to accessory muscles. Here again 
modern pedagogy and psycho-genesis have a vast wealth of 
confirmatory material which can only be referred to here. 

On the other hand, adolescence is marked by experiences 
and temptations unknown before. It has the gravest dangers. 
The curve of criminality rises rapidly, and the large number 
of most frequent commitments to various penal institutions is 
greatest in the later teens. It is the time when the ancestral 
traits of character appear. New tendencies, serious plans for 
the future, sympathy, pity, philanthropy, and the social feel- 
ings generally are either newly born or greatly reenforced. 
This is the time when Jesus's character, example, and teaching 
is most needed. He was Himself essentiallly an adolescent, 
appearing in the temple at the early oriental dawn of this 
period, and dying hardly past the age of its completion when 
the apex of manhood was reached. This is the golden period 
of life when all that is greatest and best in heart and will are 
at their strongest. If the race ever advances tO' higher levels, 
it must be by the increments at this stage, for all that follows 
it is marked by decline. Jesus came to and for adolescents, in 
a very special and peculiar and till lately not understood sense, 
and, just as it is pedagogically wrong to force Him upon child- 
hood, it is wrong not to teach Him to adolescents. Their need 
is so great as to constitute a mission motive of even more 
warmth and force than those that now prevail. No matter for 
what creed, race, or degree of civilization, and no matter what 
we think about His deity or even the veracity of the record, I 



i64 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

am convinced that there is no career or character in history 
or Hterature that so fully meets the deepest needs, supplements 
the weaknesses and defects, and strengthens all the good im- 
pulses of this period as His. This I can urge with a full heart 
and mind upon Turk, Jew, atheist, idolater, or ethical culturist, 
and I believe that everyone well trained and instructed in mod- 
ern psychology and pedagogy could do the same even though 
he denied all the supernatural traits and incidents in the life of 
Jesus, or even thought him a myth. He could still say this 
grand tradition or ideal is true to the human heart and ex- 
perience because it finds it and saves it better than anything 
else at this stage. 

Here, again. Professor Dawson's curves are full of interest. 
If it is surprising to see the development of Old Testament 
interests before puberty, and that under conditions which lead 
us to believe would be far more marked if the Old and New 
had an equal chance with the children, it is still more striking 
to see the rapid rise of the curve of interest in Jesus from 
fourteen on to twenty, with which year his census stops. Paul 
arouses almost no interest whatever at this age save a slight 
one for girls after eighteen. There is little in his life save the 
viper incident that appeals to boyhood, little in his character 
and less in all his writings that appeals to youth. The place 
for stress upon his work is later. The Gospels are essentially 
adolescent, and this nascent period is a day of grace which 
must not be sinned away. No age is capable of such hearty 
unreserved devotion to Jesus as adolescence. The sublimity of 
His teachings and His motives, the meanings of many, of the 
fifty parables, the Messianic expectation now realized like the 
prophetic dreams of boyhood at the advent of this age, the 
temptation, the Sermon on the Mount, the characters of John 
and Peter, which in the Dawson census are preferred even to 
that of Jesus, the heroism in the face of danger, the complete 
devotion that sacrifices life itself for what is dearer than life, 
the slow development of a subjective side of life and of an 
inner oracle of right and wrong, the tender budding conscience 
newly polarized to right and wrong — all these in their depth 
and inwardness appease a real psychic hunger. 

Here, again, we see how the child and the Bible developed 
in a parallel way. Primitive man, like the boy of twelve, lived 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 165 

in a world in which the senses are most acute and keenly dis- 
criminative and receptive, as Gilbert and others have shown, 
and when the efferent or motor activities are more varied and 
sustained than at any other time of life, as Johnson has made 
plain in his studies of the play instinct. Yet all this harmony 
and fitness is rudely violated by current methods, one of which 
actually reverses this order, teaching the New Testament first 
and the Old last, and the other with a seven-year course which 
hopelessly confuses this plain order of nature, oscillating with 
no reason or motive from Old to New, and that, too, with a 
wooden uniformity which did a certain good service in its day, 
but which is directly in the teeth of all modern elective 
and even individual studies that have transformed secular 
teaching. 

IIL In teaching Jesus His humanity should be first incul- 
cated with wise reticence concerning His deity and all the 
supernatural elements in the Gospels. With little children un- 
der eight or nine we can and should teach at Christmas the 
nativity, and at the Lenten season ending with Easter, the death 
and resurrection. At the very least, whatever the parents' 
creed, these are current traditions without understanding and 
feeling which the child is unintelligent and ignorant of much 
that is best in art and literature. There is a distinct age when 
fairy tales, myths, and legends involving abundant supernat- 
ural factors are needed to exercise and open the receptive 
powers of the soul, and there is a distinct age some years be- 
fore adolescence, as Barnes has shown, when doubt begins for 
the average child. Santa Glaus and Jack Frost are perhaps 
first to be transplanted from the realm of fact to that of imag- 
ination, and the question — Is it really true? — may be hyper- 
trophied and made abnormally insistent by wrong methods; 
and, during the years which intervene between this period and 
adolescence, the human Jesus with little admixture of any 
thought of divinity should be as firmly established as possible 
in both the knowledge and affections. Ghildren love biogra- 
phy. A personal element needs to animate even geography, 
and earth should be taught as the home of man. Here, again, 
as Dawson urges in substance, we should beware of investing 
Jesus with the mysteries of the Trinity and Incarnation, be- 
cause this is sure to detract from His simplicity and natural- 



i66 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ness for children. He must be given a secure place in the 
earliest affections first. 

Sunday-school teachers are especially prone to violate this 
rule. They cannot wait to tell the little ones that Jesus is the 
son of the supreme almighty God, that He came down from 
heaven in a mysterious way and died, and went back according 
to a preconceived plan. As Bushnell said of religious teachers 
as a class, they are prone to precipitate haste for immediate 
results, and are striving to reap where they have not sown 
and before they have sown, forgetting the law of first the 
blade, then the ear. 

The results of this method, as now apparent from modern 
explorations of the content and state of children's minds on this 
subject, are sad in the extreme. Jesus is conceived as, if not 
a kind of centaur, a somewhat ghostly unreal being, human 
in all but His blood, which was the blue ichor of heaven, and 
gave Him an indigo or cerulean complexion, as some say; 
God above, man below, or God within masquerading in a hu- 
man exterior, or sometimes a kind of docetic phantom and oc- 
casionally, to the plastic childish fancy, a really monstrous 
being. He is to be approached with a peculiar attitude and 
with faculties attuned in the most unnatural way. To some 
children He is a mongrel being whose deity and manhood 
crossed have neutralized away every salient or interesting 
trait in both. Some describe Him as transparent or blue, with 
a rainbow around His head, floating in the air, fond of night 
and graveyards, with a reservoir of divine knowledge and 
power, which it was very kind of Him to repress; but all of 
which tend to remove Him from that close natural contact with 
the heart without which the teaching of Him is of no effect. 
Thus teachers take away the human Jesus from children; for 
them antipedagogical methods make the incarnation, however 
it be interpreted, of no effect, and we are no longer surprised 
that John and Peter are more real and interesting to children 
than Jesus. Many Christologists now teach that Jesus grew 
to a sense of immanent deity only late in His career ; but, if so, 
here again we invert nature and enforce the later adult in- 
sights upon childhood — a pedagogical fault which is like be- 
ginning with the cube root or the calculus instead of at addi- 
tion or subtraction, and ignores the necessity of first filling His 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 167 

humanity with all the grandeur it can hold, so that belief in 
deity, if it unfold, will come like a welcome surplusage or over- 
flow of all that our conceptions of humanity can contain. 

Not only do our Sunday-school methods thus tend to make 
the Gospel teaching of no effect by their traditions and weaken 
the natural power of the plain record itself, but they thus lay 
deep the foundations of later skepticism. The recent convert 
or the warm-hearted Christian parent, who must impart his or 
her latest insights to the youngest, who has just attained to a 
deep sense of deity in the Bible narrative, lacks the reserve 
and control that is best for children. Pedagogical dedivinitiz- 
ing or making purgation of the traditional superhuman factors 
may be hard, but so is it in seed time to wait for the harvest; 
but the teacher must not forget that the heart of early adoles- 
cents can only go out toward those persons and objects that 
are most real, vivid, and human, and that every intimation or 
suspicion of an alien element is sure to weaken love. Then, 
more than at any other period, the child is a humanist, and, 
like the old Roman, deems nothing human alien from himself. 
Then he is least interested in anything either super- or infra- 
human. Thus, everything that tends to make Jesus natural — 
all comparisons with the heroes of fact or fiction — are helpful. 
If we ought to borrow from our Catholic friends some of the 
more vivid presentations of wonders and mysteries of the 
saints for the period of early childhood, here all Sunday- 
school teachers should sit at the feet of our Unitarian friends. 
A careful study of their copious Sunday-school literature con- 
vinces me that, whatever else may be said of it or of them, 
nothing so fits the nature and needs of children in the early 
adolescent studies of Jesus as their methods and ideas. The 
amalgamation of God and man, whether it result in an alloy 
or in a more mechanical adjunction of parts like the prophet's 
image, is almost certain to leave in the mind pictures, thought 
forms, and concepts that have to be reconstructed later if the 
soul is not stunted but grows on toward maturity. Concep- 
tions of the supernatural will thus surely be weeded out when 
the almost inevitable skepticism of manhood comes, and this 
is likely to make more or less havoc with the mind and heart 
condemned to a needless pain and labor of reconstruction. 
Hence, it is a pedagogical lesson of great moment that fixed 



i68 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thought forms of all that, is transcendent or supernal, espe- 
cially those which pertain to reason rather than to imagina- 
tion, should be kept plastic as long as possible and not be 
allowed to harden into dogmatic rigidity, as precocious con- 
ceptions are most of all apt to do. What we know of the 
adult mind shows us that ideas of the superhuman formed early 
in life are more likely than any other to become indurated and 
encysted in a way which interferes with the expansive growth 
of both the heart and the head. 

IV. Have stories predominate, especially for young chil- 
dren. What may be called the Sunday-school parts of both 
the Old and the New Testament are mainly narrative. Events 
are chronicled in the temporal order in which they occurred. 
The relation between ancient story and history is even closer 
than the two words suggest. A panorama of events with most 
sequence in it, where the items are causally or even temporarily 
ordered, has a strange power over the human mind, which 
these days, so degenerate in this respect, know little of. In 
ancient times, when the whole body of culture was transmitted 
orally and in the form of tradition, nothing could live which 
had not vitality enough to sustain itself in memory, while 
printing keeps alive masses of more or less worthless matter, 
and has quite transformed the scope and methods of memory. 
Alliteration, assonance, rhythm, and finally rhyme, had once 
a very high mnemonic value now largely lost. We have in a 
recent book an admirable description of a typical Oriental story 
teller in the Punjab. Dull, moping, dreamy eyed during the 
day, at night when the camp fires were lighted he began to 
weave the wondrous hypnotic charm of " once upon a time," 
while his hearers, like those of vEneas of old, omnes intentique 
ora tcnebant. He warmed himself as the record grew ab- 
sorbing perhaps till, like Plato's rhapsodist Ion, or like Scho- 
penhauer's contemplator of a great work of art in the acme 
of his hedonic narcosis, he was entranced by the fervor of his 
own eloquence and became oblivious of everything else. Thus, 
we may conceive the function of the ancient minstrels and 
bards ; thus the elements of the " Iliad " and " Odyssey " were 
woven into effective shape before Homer. Ezra, it may be, 
knew how to conjure with this charm when he read the an- 
cient records all day to the people who hung upon his lips. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 169 

Thus, ancient literature lives its own real life from mouth to 
ear, and is not banished to the long circuit and far later path- 
way of transmission from hand to eye. 

I do not believe in withholding the Bible from the laity, 
but I sometimes almost wish for a law against printing some of 
the grandest traditions of the race. There is no rainbow of 
promise set in the heavens against the great and rising flood 
of printer's ink, which threatens an evil even greater than that 
of bringing the lightest things to the surface ; namely, that of 
submerging and hiding the best. Taine classifies literature 
according to its natural surviving power, beginning with the 
most ephemeral, like the daily paper, which is old to-morrow, 
and ending with the great classical works, which interest all 
men and women of all ages and cultures. I sometimes fear 
that modern educational publishers are in danger of meriting 
a condemnation akin to scribes, Talmudists, the Epigoni, who 
multiply trivialities, notes, comments, and puerilities of old 
works and devices, and launch cheap novelties that distract 
us from the best. The average day or Sunday-school teacher 
who writes new songs, poems, stories, and prints them as at- 
tractively as old illuminators magnified the letter at the expense 
of the spirit, are in my judgment doing a sorry service for the 
very cause of childhood and education they think to serve. 
Let me tell the stories and I care not who writes the text- 
books'. 

Children's stories are very simple, but objective. They 
should be graphic, serial, with the incidents perhaps connected, 
as Professor Palmer has shown, with a long string of simple 
copulas, so that the child story as he shows is, in this sense, 
essentially Homeric. At the very first many obvious and 
commonplace things will do. It is well to match the object 
or daily experience and the words, but when the soul learns 
what speech can do and takes flight in language, then the 
imagination takes up the harp and sheds a little of the 
light that never was on sea or land, and makes the child 
a possible citizen of all times and a spectator of all events. A 
good raconteur does not need to get down on all fours to the 
child, but can bring the child farther up toward his level by 
his art than by any other. Moreover, we talk much about 
mental unities, correlation and coordination of studies to knit 



17° EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the various factors of the mind together, so that we can com- 
mand our resources and bring them all to any point ; but I urge 
that nothing organizes more complete unity out of many 
diverse elements than a good story. The child's unities are 
dramatic, and the good story teller does all that Plato ascribed 
to the good musician. He knits the soul into cohesions and 
cadences it to virtue by the endless repetitions, refrains, and 
intonations that children love and thrive by. 

Hence I plead for a new profession — that of the story teller 
in the Sunday-school, who has practiced on the standard tales, 
told them to various grades and had them told back again, un- 
til they are as well developed in his or her mind as the role of 
an actor in a play with a long run, who never loses rapport for 
an instant with his audience and can preestimate the value of 
every point or even gag in it. Can we not have in the Sunday- 
school these Bible bards, though each have a very small kit of 
stories, which they can tell from long practice better than any- 
one else? Rein makes, I think, thirty-six Old Testament sto- 
ries about which he would have the third year of secular 
school life focus. Others make many more. The best test I 
know of in the teacher of young children is a power thus to 
catch and hold the attention of her restless group, well com- 
pared to scores of corks in a washtub to be kept under water 
by a teacher who has but ten fingers. A good narrator can do 
almost anything with children. He can repeat the magic of 
the Pied Piper of Hamelin, who charmed them all from their 
homes by the incantation of his magic flute. Such a teacher 
has recovered for a world to which it was lost the true pipe 
of Pan, which reveals the secrets of the world, and the lute of 
Apollo, which constrains all to pause and listen. 

Of course I would not eliminate some memory work on 
well-chosen passages, but these should be not indiscriminate 
and almost random, after the fashion of the modern " golden 
texts," but for young children should chiefly appeal to prac- 
tical morality like proverbs or to the sentiment of poetic 
sublimity ; for older children texts expressing a greater variety 
and depth of sentiment should be added. There should, of 
course, be something in the way of preparation, but fully as 
much in the way of review. For children, archaeology, philol- 
ogy, contemporary history, and results of modern research and 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 17^ 

scholarship generally should have a very subordinate place. 
Notes, lesson books, and helps of all but the simplest kind are 
a delusion and a snare, for they distract interest, break up 
unity, and morselize everything. A simple map or two and a 
very few pictures are sufficient. While the cheap prints now 
possible of the great pictures of Christ, Mary, and other per- 
sonages in the Bible may be shown together with illustrations 
of the temple, ark, costumes, etc., we must not forget that the 
modern picture cult may easily become excessive, and interfere 
with the development of the imagination. A few rude cuts 
seem to start this faculty to do better, but too many clip the 
wings of fancy and sterilize the wonderful creative power of 
childish reverie. In all this we have the difficulty of deter- 
mining just in what sense and how far the child repeats the 
history of the race, what stage of psycho-genesis corresponds 
to that of the old story teller ; but let us not forget how much 
religion owes to the imagination, which is the organ of every- 
thing not seen, which has given all the form they possess to 
the events of ancient history and to the transcendental life as 
well. Even for the apostles and the great missionaries, preach- 
ing consisted in simply telling the old story, which has not lost 
any of the ancient power inherent in it, although we have lost 
the psychic orchestration to set it in scene befitting our stage 
of civilization and the degree of the hearer's development. 

In the piles of Sunday-school literature I have looked over 
in recent years, I find happily among many better things the 
most antipedagogic methods known in the history of educa- 
tion. One requires children of seven and eight to memorize 
the " six s's " — sin. Saviour, salvation, sacrament, sanctifica- 
tion, and spiritualization, which with all the teacher's gloss 
can mean little more than abracadabra, and is a kind of mind- 
breaking process, the cruelty of which is seen just in propor- 
tion to our knowledge of the soul. The kindergarten processes 
illustrate the worst side of the American aberrations of Froe- 
bel. Sheep's wool is shown, handled, sheep are drawn, pic- 
tures of flocks of them are shown and symbolic meanings 
hinted at, although for the child happily a sheep is a sheep for 
all that. A yoke is drawn or made of sticks, a door, a heart, 
a rock, an anchor, a crown, a cross, wheat, a harp, a palm, 
a trumpet, lamp, staff, shield, dove, an open book, the word 



172 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

prayer is written up, down, right and left, a pyramid with 
twelve steps, each of which is a symbolic quality. One inter- 
mediate class is required to memorize nine abstract moral 
qualities in a certain order, a list of dates, initial letters sig- 
nifying either adjectives or the first words of texts, various 
crude blackboard drawings, with ointment, fish, pearls, lilies, 
stars, vines, boats, graves, pools, harvest scenes, sand work, 
kindergarten, sewing cards, and so on de omnibus rebus et 
quibusdam aliis. All these things are offered to the child al- 
most at random as if in hopes that the good Lord, who in the 
beginning brought order out of chaos, will here repeat the 
great cosmic ordering in each mind. Children of ten are asked 
to name six traits in the character of the Saviour, to tell the 
five things essential for the Lord's Supper, to repeat six ad- 
jectives designating attributes of Jesus, to watch against eight 
things ; sermonettes are preached on symbolic meanings of the 
phrases, "He ran before," " He saw Him," " passed through," 
" knew Him not," " abode with Him," " they murmured." 
Parallel passages are sought for " knowing the time," " rolled 
away the stone," " took bread," " watched one hour," They 
are taught how God is in the mind, heart, life, and memory ; 
how God is living, holy, present, mighty; how He must be 
served holily, seriously, reverently, prayerfully, etc. These 
are systems actually in use, and nothing in my judgment could 
be better calculated to disintegrate the mind, to make it like a 
well-used piece of blotting paper, to confuse the conscience 
until it is like a magnetic needle, the orientation of which is 
lost, so that anything can seem casuistically right, to sterilize 
the heart, and to give the natural interest which the child feels 
in religious matters immunity against its infection by vac- 
cinating with doses of attentuated culture.^ 

' Elsewhere we are told that the up-to-date teacher of Sunday-school teachers, 
who assumes the soundness of current fundamental pedagogical and psychological 
principles, has a vast repertory of devices and educational knick-knackery and 
jim-crackery. The superintendent, like the President of the United States, must 
have a cabinet to advise him. If the lesson is on the seven-year-old King Joash, 
he generates interest by calling to the platform a seven-year-old boy and asks the 
school if he would make a good president. In his quest for object lessons or per- 
haps at a platform review, he illustrates the unseen but not unfelt power of the 
Holy Spirit by a magnet of iron; the blinding power of lies and other sins by a 
veil; the complexity of the human body by the watch with long-drawn-out parallels. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i73 

The kindergarten in this country is in a transition state. 
The conservative and ultra-orthodox disciples of Froebel here 
have materialized his principles until, as I have elsewhere 
shown, they have reversed many, if not most, of their master's 
basal conceptions. The recent alliance between this element 
and the Sunday-school has produced some unique products. 
The disciples are represented by twelve tiny sticks on end ; the 
house of many mansions is made first for, then by, the children 
by piling six kindergarten blocks; a paper boat is sailed on a 
sea of green tissue crumpled for waves ; vines, thorns, thistles, 
are cut from the field and laid on the table; wheat heads are 
stuck in the sand, on which a tumbling block house is built 
beside another on a stone; the widow's mites are two tiny 
stones laid on a sheet of paper. This trivialized and puerile 
busy work no doubt keeps the young children quiet by giving 
them something to do, but like all the great body of Sunday- 
school artifacts and products of premature or overclassifica- 
tion, sermonesque methods of keeping tab on great subjects 
by enumerating adjectives, verbs, or abstract nouns, it illus- 
trates a story of Lowell's of a poultry raiser who by dint of 
much crude chemical experimentation and reasoning worked 
out and published a conclusion that he had discovered that 

The leader must be a good blackboardist and know how to sketch crosses, crowns, 
ships, serpents, lamps, and symbols. The teacher must know the birthdays of 
every member of his class; induce one pupil to influence another, follow up the 
sick and "shut in"; have them kneel in a mathematical circle for prayer. He 
must plant corn and the dahlia bulb and expatiate on the fact that each cannot 
produce the other to illustrate that what we sow we must reap. He shows a blank 
book to impress the idea that each day is a page. The leader calls a boy to the 
platform, blindfolds him, gives him one end of a thread and leads him about, and 
then makes him break it to illustrate how Samuel followed the Lord. He brings 
in a rat trap to illustrate Satan's snares. All the teachers file up and wet their 
handkerchiefs in cologne and wave them to illustrate Mary's ointment. He burns 
a match to show how the tongue is a fire; brings the plate holder of a phonograph; 
plays on the piano to illustrate that life is a harmony; takes great heed of col- 
lections and interpolates frequent treasurer's reports; is very strong in keeping 
order and rich in methods; has premiums and rewards and makes entertainments 
and sociables a field where novelties are assiduously studied. The catalogue of 
the library must be graded, and the librarian must love books and children and 
be well up in the methods of cataloguing and keeping records. Perhaps there 
must be a hospital corner for children who have sick hands, feet, temper, and 
tongues. Are not all these things recorded in the chronicles of the tribe? — (G. M. 
Boynton: The Model Sunday School. Cong. Pub. Co., Boston, 1892, 175 p. A. 
F. Schauffler: Ways of Working, Wilde, Boston, 1901.) 



174 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

celery prepared in a prescribed way had the most marvelous 
effect in fattening ducks for the market. It was cheap, easy 
to digest, produced meat of the rarest flavor, etc. The only 
possible objection to it was that ducks would not touch it, they 
were so foolish. I once saw in the Paris Zoo a vast row of 
ducks so caged that they could not stand or move, and into 
the mouths of which this or some other food was hourly in- 
jected with a huge syringe, until they could hold no more. 
The fatty degeneration that resulted was thought a triumph 
of the poultry man's art for the epicure. This is not the way 
to prepare children for God. Children suffer in soul no less 
and in ways as closely related as is the mind to the body by 
forced feeding, but, although they may develop memory 
pouches for matter ever so alien to their needs, the healthy 
mind will not assimilate it. A cogent and new argument for 
the vitality of Christianity looms up in its power to survive 
methods so bad. The true shepherd of youthful souls no 
longer believes children depraved, and does not interpret 
Wordsworth's preexistence conceptions as meaning that the 
child is an embryo theologian or moralist, but is sufficiently 
anchored in common sense to steer clear of extreme fads and 
vagaries, while keeping an open mind for all that is good in 
the new. 

V. I plead for very select tales and other matters with a 
moral bearing from non-Bible sources. Rein would center the 
first year's work in the secular schools around twelve of 
Grimm's tales; the second about Crusoe; the third about Bible 
stories. Ahrens, the German writer, pleads for the admission 
of well-chosen tales from the classical antiquity as a kind of 
limbo school Bible between the Old and the New Testament 
for Sunday-school work. Bigg urges that an " ethnic Bible " 
be composed from a slowly elaborated canon of the best tales 
from ancient myth and classical and modern literature and 
history. The French Government authorized years ago an ad- 
mirable manual designed to teach personal and civic virtue by 
illustrious examples, and now there are many of these. Mr. 
Frothingham's child book of religion supplies a few admirable 
tales. Choice fables from vEsop down to La Fontaine and 
Schleiermacher, selections from the Round Table cycle, from 
Homer, Virgil, Herodotus, a few of Plato's myths, Dante, now 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i75 

briefly told with admirable charts in several manuals, some of 
the Norse and Germanic tales of Edda and Niebelungen, such 
as Balder, which I have tried myself with good results, selec- 
tions perhaps from Andersen. Some or all of these might be 
used. For some hundreds of years the Bolandists have been 
waiting the lives of the saints, now many thousand in number, 
whom the church has canonized for eminent virtue. Baring 
Gould has selected and digested some of these in his six vol- 
umes, and Mrs. Chenoweth and others have retold them ef- 
fectively for Protestant children. Comte renamed every day 
of the year in his positivist calendar after some great thinker 
in science and philosophy in imitation of the saint days. Many 
of these stories have a tinsel air of ultra-saccharine goodness 
about them that hardly fits the modern or, at least, the Protes- 
tant, child with his early critical spirit, but reconstructed, nat- 
uralized, and selected hagiology will yield a precious deposit 
of golden deeds and heroic self-sacrifice here stored up as in 
a great arsenal. 

The school itself in many places is now assuming the work 
of Bible teaching. The London School Board lately had a full 
syllabus of it occupying half or three fourths of an hour daily, 
with semiannual examinations. It is, of course, undenomina- 
tional. Prussia requires at least five hours a week of religious 
instruction by trained teachers for eight years by the method 
of narration chiefly, with subsequent discussion and some mem- 
ory work. The Schulz-Klix " Biblische Lesebuch " reached 
its fifty-third edition in 1896. In the schools of France, where 
no religious instruction is permitted, every Thursday entire 
is a holiday, so that parents can have their children taught 
the religion they prefer outside of the school, but the instruct- 
ors, although selected by their respective churches, must, as in 
Germany, pass a state examination as a test of competency. 
To these we might add several well-arranged little handbooks 
like that of the women of the Chicago Educational Union or 
of Professor Moulton, containing select readings from the 
Bible for the school. All this work, of course, is undenom- 
inational, and the Bible is taught as literature and history. 

This new reciprocity of subject matter between Sunday- 
and day-school cannot fail to help both. The matter is a 
great addition to the latter, and the former is incited to better 



176 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

methods. Moreover, a great basal principle is involved. The 
Bible has come to be held superior to all other literature in 
Christendom because of its merits. The world is more and 
more reluctant to give its highest place to men or books be- 
cause of their pedigree or origin. Scripture, we must not for- 
get, became Bible by inherent pierit and worth, and by this 
title alone it can remain so. Only those who know something 
of the power of the best pagan classics and of the ethnic Bibles, 
who have had some sympathetic presentation even of the Gos- 
pel of Buddha, the Bibles of Confucianism and Mohammed- 
ism, as well as of the great literary monuments, can judge 
comparatively of the merits of our Bible. I have not a shadow 
of doubt or fear that it will survive this inevitable and impend- 
ing test, and that all comparisons may be safely challenged. 
But, further yet, only thus can it rest upon a solid and secure 
foundation of reverence in the individual soul. Abundant 
answers to syllabi indicate that, where children's minds have 
been fairly exposed to the contagions of all these sources, their 
suffrages confirm the choice of Christendom. There are, how- 
ever, valuable lessons, religious as well as intellectual and 
moral, taught from these ah-extra sources, which are not con- 
tained in Scripture, and for which by the narrative method 
there is time even in the Sunday-school. 

VL Nature Teaching. — This is now urged with great 
force upon the secular school, and there are many new and 
most hopeful beginnings, but I plead for at least a small place, 
wherever the conditions are favorable, for inculcating nature as 
a means of developing the religious sentiments. These rest on 
awe and reverence and a sensus numinis, which makes the un- 
devout astronomer and, we might add now, the irreverent 
chemist and biologist, mad. I would have no technical teach- 
ing of either methods or names in the Sunday-school, but a 
mythic or, rather, poetic standpoint developed which will en- 
courage the child to that love of nature out of which have 
rolled not only the burdens of Bibles, but the best impulses 
that have created art, science, and religion. Beda looked 
through his rude telescope to turn aside and write a gloria in 
excelsis. Renan says Judaism owes almost its existence to the 
mountain phenomena and experiences at Sinai. The poet, who 
plucked the flower from the crannied wall, perhaps felt the 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i77 

same pagan worship which in his remote ancestors was turned 
to Ygdrasil, and eadier yet to the Dodona oak. The sky and 
sea have had great agency in shaping man's rehgious instincts. 
It is to avoid the sad havoc which befalls every mind that 
thinks there can be an opposition between science and religion, 
both of which are expressions of the same deity. Just as I 
plead elsewhere for a good course in science in every theolog- 
ical school, so here I urge that even the rudiments of science 
have a direct effect. On their foundations, in part, true re- 
ligion must forever rest, and the Sunday-school cannot afford 
to entirely neglect them. 

VII. I plead for more purely intellectual instruction, first, 
for the Old Testament in its season, then during the earlier 
years of adolescence for the New. American teachers are 
prone to feel that the great disparity between the Bible and 
other literature indicates a radical difference in the method of 
teaching. This is the reiterated plea by which the systems 
now in vogue resist proposed improvements. There is a feel- 
ing that in the soul of the child once brought in contact with 
the basal truths of religion some mysterious, if not magical, 
process occurs of a totally different kind from the glow and 
tingle evoked by any secular literature. Almost any text, in- 
cident, picture, or name, it is felt, may be reenforced super- 
naturally by the agency of the Holy Spirit, and be made a 
means of salvation. Hence, the Sunday-school teacher feels 
that this heavenly muse is behind him seconding his efforts 
and supplementing all his intellectual defects of knowledge and 
even preparation, provided only he puts a heart of fervid unc- 
tion into his work, so that prayer is perhaps a more important 
preparation for it than careful study. He no longer expects 
to see miracles in the natural world, but is always alert await- 
ing sudden transformations of mind, heart, and will in his 
pupils at any moment. Many teachers are thinking of either 
conversions or direct moral effects far more than of solid ex- 
amination knowledge of Scripture. 

There is a radical error here involved. The psychologist 
knows that laws of the soul are now no more suspended than 
those of nature ; that to secure any result there must be a care- 
ful study of the ways of adapting means to the end, and the 
more judicious and wise the former the better will be the lat- 

13 



178 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ter. Nothing would seem more obvious than the law that to 
best produce its best results, Scripture must first be well 
known. The deplorable fact now generally admitted is that 
children go through our entire courses and emerge with an 
almost incredible ignorance of the Bible. On all sides we hear 
this recognized and deplored, and I forbear to multiply inci- 
dents at hand. In this respect we have very much to learn 
from other religions. The best Jewish Sunday-schools I have 
seen, teach not only Old Testament history, but Jewish history 
down to the present time, and also the Hebrew language. Pro- 
motions are made by examination only. A council of the best 
available men sits in another room in the temple during the 
entire session, discussing ways, means, teachers, to which in- 
dividual pupils are sent for reproof, reward, suggestions about 
health, to the physician, etc. I once followed one of these 
courses with considerable detail and with great edification. 
The best Catholic schools I know incite the children by com- 
petition and prizes, and award diplomas for the completion of 
the course, which is marked, as in so many other religious 
bodies, by confirmation. In Germany the accredited teacher 
of the Jewish, Catholic, and Protestant children pursues meth- 
ods essentially like those approved by the secular school for 
teaching literature and history. Those who object to these 
systems because they do not turn out church members imply 
that a scholarly system is more unwise than an unscholarly 
one. Is it not rather plain that we want all this and some- 
thing more, and not something less? I urge that a good 
teacher, even though not a church member, may fill a very 
important place in the Sunday-school. Is anyone so ignorant 
as to suppose that these methods of teaching are the cause of 
the small church attendance in Berlin? If so, let us reverse 
our efforts, and, if not close the Sunday-schools, at least stem 
this rising demand for better pedagogic devices, and go back 
to the catechetical method of our forefathers and the time 
when a far larger proportion of Sunday-school children were 
converted than now. It is possible to stir the sentiments su- 
perficially, more intensely, almost inversely to the amount of 
knowledge. Rude people and ages are impressionable and sus- 
ceptible to a degree which vanishes directly as culture increases. 
The objection I combat, therefore, really means, when psychol- 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i79 

ogists interpret it, a plea for a return to a primitive condition 
which very few indeed here now consciously advocate. 

VIII. The miraculous should have a prominent place, for 
it has a great function. The pedagogical aspect of the super- 
natural dep€nds upon its psychology, and both represent unique 
standpoints so far quite unknown to both the scientist and the 
theologian. It is neither foolishness to be eliminated and no 
whit less is it dogma or even necessarily fact, but something 
higher and more vital. Man lives in two worlds — one the me- 
chanical world of matter, force and law, of the things of sense 
and physical science; and another world of things imagined 
rather than objectively known, believed rather than proved, 
the world of poetry, of faith and hope. The one is the world 
of matter, whether crass or subtle as ether; the other is the 
super- or extra-natural world. The criterion of one is ob- 
jective existence; of the other subjective need. In the one the 
head, in the other the heart, predominates. The organ of one 
is logic; that of the other feeling and sentiment. From an- 
other aspect we may call one immanent, and the other the 
transcendent world. If we take the larger view of nature, 
Schleiermacher is right in urging that there is nothing so nat- 
ural as the supernatural. Faith, perhaps one of the mightiest 
of all words, the substance of things hoped for, the evidence 
of things not seen, cannot be sharply distinguished from the 
imagination, which is the most creative function of the soul. 

I here carefully avoid a favorite occupation of many mod- 
ern psychologists, who love to compare and analogize these 
two as both projections of the ego, using the processes in- 
volved in the cognition of matter to crassify and lend reality 
to things spiritual, using the latter to lend a higher degree of 
ideality to matter and force. Labor in this field is a life voca- 
tion now for many, but for reasons I have elsewhere shown 
has subordinate interest for me.^ The history of thought 
shows that these two universes have always tended to be in- 
versely as each other. A positivistic mind and age has little 
room for spiritual verities. In it the transcendent world fades 
and perhaps quite vanishes. In periods of the opposite bias 
men forget their environment and are absorbed in ecstatic 

* G. S. Hall: College Philosophy. The Forum, June, 1900, vol. 29, pp. 409-422. 



i8o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

contemplation of far-away realities. As heaven and hell grow 
real, finite existence loses interest only to regain it with great 
emphasis when the objects of faith fade away. This is the 
soul's double housekeeping ; here is the world of sight, yonder 
in the Jenseits of faith. The ascetic neoplatonist seer sacri- 
fices all that makes the present natural life dear for these other 
world interests. 

Perhaps animism marks the beginning of the great tran- 
scendent cult, for it ascribes a second interior or separable self 
to objects. Belief in spirits, ghosts, ancestors, mahatmas, an- 
gels, Zeus, Brahma, all conceptions of preexistence or reincar- 
nation, all beliefs in post-mortem existence, where souls are 
herded, gods and demigods of every degree — all these are ex- 
pressions not of objective reality, but of the needs of the human 
soul. They live, move, and have their being in the tran- 
scendentalizing factors of faith and poetic imagination, and 
here alone they will be real forever. The soul is their bearer, 
and in a degree far more pregnant than Schopenhauer's famous 
text, " the world is my concept," the modern psychologist 
knows and says " the spiritual world is my feeling instincts 
uttered and expressed." Not by conscious purpose or design 
does man make his own gods; they are rather the objectiviza- 
tion of his desires, innate longings, unconscious deposits of 
fancy. Nay, rather, they are not even these so much as the 
slow phyletic evolutions of the race soul. They fit his nature 
and needs because they sprang from them. They stir the deep- 
est regions of the soul because they are its oldest formations. 
They seem more real than matter, and are nearer and truer 
because they are made of soul stuff and not of sense stuff. 
The original theological faculties of the soul were mythopeic, 
and Jacobi was right in a sense which modern psycho-genesis 
makes vastly larger than his " the heart makes the theologian." 
Pectoral theology is the true theology. Schleiermacher, the 
greatest genius of modern times in this field, was charged to 
the saturation point with this idea in his Reden, and the best 
part of his masterpiece on faith defines all religious verities 
as the formulations of feeling. True religion in even a higher 
degree than poetry or art is creative. 

When that great day shall dawn, wherein the artist, who 
creates by efferent willed activities, takes his rightful place 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i8i 

above the professor who merely knows, rehgion will be re- 
vived in the best hearts and lives in a way and degree which 
it does not now enter into the heart of man to conceive. Then 
belief in the divine will not depend upon demonstrations, 
either of the old style familiar in natural theology or the new 
type which finds evidences of God in the nature of knowledge, 
but we shall realize the pregnant saying that, whereas men 
have vainly thought, from Anselm down, to confer honor 
upon Deity by carefully working out new proofs of His exist- 
ence, forgetting that all that can be proved can also be dis- 
proved, it is wiser to leave the divine existence to that deeper, 
more intuitive region of the soul where belief closes in with 
its own with an instant affinity and certainty that leaves all 
intellectual proof far behind. Let us, then, restore and wel- 
come the degraded word superstition as being of things above, 
and not below, the realm of mind. Nothing lies so close and 
so warm about the heart, and, although nothing so needs edu- 
cation, it is the faculty by which man is most above the 
animals. 

Again, the feeling instincts with their organs, faith, and 
imagination, are larger and more generic than the intellect in 
a very different sense from that urged by Kidd. The faculties 
of this stratum of our nature are complete, while those which 
make up the intellect are fragmentary. They represent the 
race, while the intellect expresses the individual. But little of 
the former can come to consciousness in a single life, but by 
the belief function man is rescued from all his limitations of 
time and space. He lives everywhere and at all times. These 
are the totalizing powers which supplement the vaunted ex- 
perience of epistemologists. It is by and through them that 
the soul becomes prophetic, penetrating the future, anticipat- 
ing in far-off and ruder times the glories of Christ and of the 
golden all-hail hereafter. These proleptic powers in us are 
the whole human species divinely stirring in the individual, 
tinging his dingy life with the halo of uncreated light, reen- 
forcing the personal resolve of to-day with some of the mo- 
mentum of the whole evolutionary process. Thus, when we 
perceive and reason it is our own isolated individual self; 
when we launch upon the great sea of feeling we represent 
humanity itself. 



i82 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Now the higher truths of religion are revelations to the 
single self from cosmic man in us. They seem objective be- 
cause they are not born in our own lives; they are not the 
object seen, but the power of vision itself. The absorption in 
a great work of art, the fervor that sometimes makes men 
fanatics and zealots, the lofty emprise of soul which believes 
because it is absurd, the insistence upon the preeminence of 
the great plastic creations of literature as classical or as even 
infallibly revealed, is because they speak the language of this 
larger man within us, and not that of empirical individual ex- 
perience. For the former creations we love to throw the whole 
stress of conviction into such words as revealed, inspired, di- 
vine, and just in proportion to the completeness with which 
we realize their grand formulae. The boundaries of personal 
existence expand until they become coterminous with those of 
le grand etre, leviathan, or by whatever term we call the genus 
man. 

This hard saying once fully realized, we are able to ap- 
proach the questions, first, how to grade values from the low- 
est superstition up to the highest, and, second, what is the 
true pedagogy of the supernatural? The root of all super- 
stition is a sense of something deeper and more real in things 
than sense phenomena teach. It is an outcrop of the sensus 
numinis; an age and a race in which it is excessive has great 
but utterly undeveloped capacities for faith. The very fecun- 
dity of fancy seen in animism, the gendering of all nouns in 
the personification of natural objects, the persistent mythic 
construction of the world, is the promise and potency of the 
highest literature, art, and religion. If these elements are de- 
veloped coherently and shoot together into connected epics or 
theoganies — if the gods are organized into ranks and their 
lives or adventures elaborated, or any cult of spiritual beings 
is articulated, then the race is climbing the slow, hard way 
up to a culture period. If it remains incoherent and discon- 
nected, or lapses to abject fears of incorporeal agencies, the 
ethnic stock in which this occurs aborts and becomes decadent, 
or at least reverts to a fallow state, to start again later. The 
highest races work over this culture stuff into forms of sublim- 
ity, beauty, and order; Olympus and all the demigods of 
Homer and the dramatists ensue. Highest of all must forever 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 183 

be placed those races that not only organized the transcendent 
world, but brought its whole efficiency to bear for moral ad- 
vancement. Not the kalo kagatheia, but the Semitic powers 
that make for righteousness become supreme, and faith merges 
with the underived and sublime ought of Kant's categorical 
imperative. This is the anabasis, the way up of the feeling 
instincts, which the catabasis, or the way down, reverses. We 
can now see the profound meaning of the etymology, the 
philologically criticised but sometimes psychologically prob- 
able origin of the word religion as binding back. As each 
soul unfolds it thrills anew as it comes in contact with the 
ancient verities of the heart like " vague snatches of Uranian 
antiphone," from which perhaps there is a sense of previous 
alienation, but now of complete at-one-ment, for it has found 
its own. 

I cannot agree with some of my friends of the ultra-Uni- 
tarian and free religious camp that the supernatural has no 
place in the religious education of the young, but hold, on the 
contrary, that it has a place almost central and supreme. I 
insist that we misconceive and misteach it. Here, as else- 
where, education must begin with rudiments, and repeat the 
history of the race. Every child is through and through a 
fetish worshiper at a certain stage. Examine the contents of 
a boy's pocket, find the meaning of the smooth and pretty 
stones and trinkets that he takes wherever he goes, puts in 
cotton or near the fire of a cold night, lets down into wells 
and ponds to enlarge their experience, feels a sympathetic 
pang for if they are broken. Ponder the meager but precious 
literature now evolving of even adults who are inseparable 
from some mascot or shun some hoodoo, and it will be ap- 
parent that these are the same processes, psychic and physical, 
which bind the Bushman to his charmed amulet. The faith 
instincts of the soul are accommodated to such things in their 
nascent period, and they educate these faculties at that stage 
better than any other, so that he who knows nothing of the 
fetish stage is liable to be less able to grasp the transcendent 
truths of faith later. Again, the child's sentiment toward 
flowers, stars, favorite trees, the sun and moon, repeats, though 
evanescently, the history of the race in the religious evolution 
of which temples and elaborate ritual have grown up about 



i84 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

these centers. All were at one time the highest expressions of 
the religious sentiments in the world, so in the child's feeling 
toward animals we see abundant rudiments of totemism. His 
hero worship is the same. 

Here, again, I would borrow from pagan and Catholic 
sources many discarded and, alas ! now disconnected elements 
for my religious curriculum. Care should, of course, be con- 
stantly taken lest the mind dwell too long in the lower stages, 
but also to bring out the high educational value of the experi- 
ence of transcending a lower for a higher form. Perhaps 
individual prescriptions of ghost stories, angels, fairies, apothe- 
osized heroes will have their place when we have evolved a 
complete scheme that fits the soul. All the elements of the 
supernal which rest upon the intellect are cold, dried herbarium 
specimens, while these things live only when and where they 
are most deeply and profoundly felt. 

If science is now a trifle inhospitable to these educational 
uses and values of the transcendent — if we have low concep- 
tions of myth instead of conceiving it as the high art formula- 
tion of the unknown or the uncertain, as Plato did, it is be- 
cause the psychology of the feelings is still undeveloped. They 
and all these creations witness to the fact that man is not yet 
complete; that the best things and the greatest things can 
never happen to the individual; that his soul is not unre- 
sponsive, but, rather, is a part of all that has been which re- 
verberates in him. Have there been new things brought con- 
sciously into the modern world ? If so, we must reflect that all 
that is thus entelechized in history was once only this germ 
of faith which can make and remove mountains. Its " not 
yet " is a rudimentary organ in the soul. This, whether a bud 
of the future or a relic of the past in the soul, whether a germ 
or a vestige, will have a great place in the evolutionary psy- 
chology of the future. It has inspired every prophetic leader 
who has walked by faith and not by sight, and to the proper 
guidance and unfoldment of this great group of most mis- 
conceived, now forced, now neglected, faculties, the religious 
teacher must bend his consummate art and study. 

IX. The complete and ideal Sunday-school should make 
provision for maturer and cultivated young men and women 
according to principles not yet recognized. The Pauline writ- 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN. 185 

ings are to some extent suited to this, but certainly not to 
earlier periods. This is true also, but to less extent, for the 
prophecies, which, however, pedagogically precede. Here, too, 
there should be some study of patristics, and the burden of 
church history belongs here. It would be ideal also to have 
a little comparative study here of the great ethnic religions 
with a taste of the philosophy of religion, and almost any 
condensed germinal matter in ethics and psychology would 
not be out of place. A dominant aim should be to expose to 
the mind the results of the highest culture in all these faiths, 
but in a way to warm and not to chill the heart ; to break down 
the inveterate feeling that there can be opposition between 
science or philosophy and religion. I have known a successful 
study of the higher evolution represented by Drummond's 
" Ascent of Man," and of what is now often called the higher 
pantheism. In this new and higher story for which I plead 
there should be neither field nor faith for any conventional 
orthodoxies of creed. The type of mind once associated with 
the very name deacon, so far as this implied a perfervid de- 
fender of things as they are and involved an atmosphere of 
repression for any sincere doubt or outre opinion, should be 
carefully excluded. The atmosphere here should invite growth 
and expansion in all directions, and the period of circumnuta- 
tion, before the young mind selects and clasps its support, 
should be prolonged. This should be essentially the stage of 
inquiry, where ingenuous youth brings its inmost burning 
questions and ideals. I plead for a distinct esoteric character 
here for thought directed especially to the future, recognizing 
that the ideals of the young are the best material for prophecy. 
Criticism, higher and lower, and all the general standpoints 
and even pagan ideals, which are so formative but so often 
repressed and neglected, belong here. This is the place for all 
the problems which Desjardins and his followers have raised 
in France and Germany. 

In the past religion has been evoked to rescue its own 
heart from legalists, scribes, and Pharisees, to escape the 
thraldom of sophists and scholastics. Once Europe resounded 
with the call to save the holy sepulcher from pagans, and 
again to rescue the Bible and conscience from the church to 
individual control. Now a new rally, comparable with any of 



i86 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

these, is needed to rescue childhood and youth from perverse 
methods of teaching the highest of all subjects. While I am 
far from the egotism of comparing the principles above enun- 
ciated to the epoch-making thesis which Luther nailed to the 
church door, I insist that childhood is now no whit less in 
need of a reformation in its religious regimen than was the 
adult mind then. Yet the magnitude of the work grows to a 
significance not less than then just in proportion as we come 
to understand the true nature of childhood. Nothing is really 
true unless it rest on deep foundations in human nature and 
needs, and all that does not square with that nature is false. 
Childhood and youth in their best impulses of development 
are not perverse, but point more infallibly than anything else 
to the constant pole of human destiny. Das Ewig-Kindliche 
is now taking its place beside, if not in some respects above, 
das Ezvig-W eibliche as man's pillar of cloud by day and fire 
by night to lead him on. The modern student of psycho- 
genesis sees almost a new continent of meaning in setting the 
child in the midst, and becoming as a child to enter the king- 
dom of heaven which is " of such." He holds a new brief for 
this hitherto submerged third of the human race. The mis- 
conceptions and distortions of children, body and soul, have 
been the reproach of not only rude but cultured ages. Here 
we must begin with a frank confession of past ignorance and 
sin, and bring forth fruits meet therefor. We are still ex- 
posed to the full force of the penalty which threatens those 
who offend these little ones. Let us pray that the good God 
may wink at times of past ignorance, but not forget that, now 
that recent studies of the human soul are revealing the Bible 
as the world's great text-book in psychology, we have no cloak 
for our sin. It is not a question of petty tinkering devices, 
but of a deep and radical change of plan, goal, and method 
now well developed and taught in institutions accessible to 
those earnest enough to undertake serious study. Plain 
though many principles are, others have yet to be determined, 
and there is also, let me repeat, a vast work of details before 
the completion of what is already begun. 

In his " Vedanta " Max Miiller praises this system of Indie 
philosophy as standing distinctly above the Vedas or Hindu 
Bible, as something into which the elite speculative minds 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 187 

penetrate, as a kind of meta-theological region wherein much 
might seem to those who ghmpse it from beneath contradictory 
to the Vedic teaching, but he praises the harmony thus estab- 
hshed between rehgion and philosophy as merely different 
stages of development of one and the same content, the incon- 
sistencies between which are those inherent in the nature of 
growth itself. So I plead for a realm for these higher ques- 
tions as the best safeguard against arrest and retrogression. 
It is a singular infirmity of religions that, much as they stim- 
ulate growth lower, they are prone to arrest it at a certain 
higher stage; so that the last moult of the soul as it seeks to 
cast off the cyst of dogma is prevented. Of all the many forms 
of the pervasive and insistent sense of finality of a finishing 
and finished education, this is the most dwarfing. The upper 
grades of our Sunday-school work too often confirm juvenile 
conceptions and sentiments, and prevent the development of 
mature manhood and womanhood in religion. This was the 
lack which the neo-Christian movement sought to meet, per- 
haps characteristically, by dispensing with all creeds. Neither 
the pulpit nor the college Y. M. C. A. quite meets the needs 
of the best academic minds, and Protestant Christendom to- 
day, in my judgment, needs nothing more than a kind of 
mission especially constituted for and addressed to them. Dur- 
ing an experience of more than a score of years as a professor 
of philosophical subjects, where the deeper matters of belief 
are constantly touched, I have been profoundly impressed 
with the need of modern ditctores dubitantium, or soul mid- 
wives, of a higher order than yet exists. Many seem to need 
not only a second but a series of regenerations like another 
sun risen on midnoon. It sometimes almost seems from this 
standpoint as if Christianity itself, at least as now best formu- 
lated, does not quite suffice far as it overtops all other relig- 
ions, but as though we must look forward to a kind of third 
dispensation of a new eternal gospel such as has hovered 
before the minds of not a few lofty souls since Christendom 
began. We must not set an arbitrary goal at any rate to the 
possibilities of human development. We must not forget that 
if the race is slowly advancing and each generation adding a 
little, this advancement can take place, not in the stages of 
complete maturity, still less after it, but only by prolonging 



i88 • EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the later stages of adolescent evolution. Here only the future 
man that is to be slowly burgeons.^ 

It is in this connection that our theological schools are 
most of all unsatisfactory. They close questions rather than 
open them to the methods of progress, which is always prone 
to be dialectic. It is notorious that institutions established to 
turn out those who are to save souls and teach so much that 
is good precisely fail to teach psychology or the doctrine of 
the soul, and that, too, in an age when it is a center of interest 
and study as never before, and in an age which the future 
historian of culture will designate as the psychological age of 
the world. No other field is so competent to regenerate these 
institutions, and create new centers of interest that will mobil- 
ize all old knowledge and repolarize the soul in conformity to 
the mind and will of Jesus, whose psychology is one of the 
great impending themes. Religion represents the most vital 
part of the soul, but by an iron law and because moments, 
men, and ages of the greatest vitality are rarest, nothing so 
tends to lapse to formalism, routine, and dogma. This stage 
of life is the highest and best as science now conceives it. 
Complete maturity already means decline from the highest 
human level. Hence, to guide the souls of youth is the very 

^ Adolf Harnack, at the Forty-ninth Annual Meeting of the German Philologists 
and Gymnasia! Teachers in Basel, September, 1907, created what is described 
in the German pedagogical journals as real consternation, by proposing radical 
transformation of religious training in secondary education. For the higher 
gymnasial classes he would completely abolish the critical authoritative methods 
now in use and in their place establish courses based upon modern critical and 
historical methods. Only thus can this subject remain. Since, however, there 
are stages in the development of the pupils in which exclusively authoritative 
religious instruction has no place, and at the same time the modern critical methods 
would be premature, Harnack proposes for two years, in the middle of the course, 
to entirely omit this subject. For the four upper classes he would have a course 
in which the fourth or unter secunda should study the history of the religion of Israel 
and the Old Testament, the third the story of Jesus and primitive Christianity, 
the second should be introduced into Catholicism and early Protestantism, and the 
first class — ober prima — should study the essence of religion and Christianity with 
special reference to the vital problems of the present. In conformity with this, he 
would have also courses established at the university to prepare teachers for this 
work. The speaker insisted that students knew extremely little of the nature of 
other confessions, and that this was a great defect of culture that must be remedied. 
The conceptions which Protestant youth hold of Catholicism are almost inconceiv- 
ably crude. The knowledge of church history must be relied upon to remedy this 
evil. * 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 189 

highest test of all preaching and teaching. Youth want in- 
spiration rather than formulae; vistas and hints rather than 
reasons. They are lifted by suggestion and imitation, and 
always gravitate from theology to philosophy and from phil- 
osophical to psychological problems and aspect of things.^ 

^ In England education has been mainly voluntary, and government and law 
makers have had till lately little to do with it. The pious founders and philanthropists 
who have given the time, work, money, and interest by which most has been done, 
are a unique feature of this land without a parallel in others. Thus, Raikes founded 
the Sunday-school in 1781 mainly to teach secular branches, and admitted all who 
would wash. A few paid trifling fees, and here on Sunday all the children of the 
poor, save those who could find entrance to the endowed charity schools, were 
taught the three r's and little else. They were essentially secular schools held on 
Sunday. Since the government took up the serious work of public education, how- 
ever, about fifty years ago, Sunday-school teaching has become mainly religious, 
so that there is a sense which Fitch (Educational Aims and Methods, by Sir Joshua 
Fitch. Lecture 13, Macmillan, 1900) well recognizes in which the English Sunday- 
school has now become more or less superfluous, especially since the law of 1870 
and its successors, which provides day schools for all who need elementary instruc- 
tion, and requires even in the municipal schools Bible reading and rehgious in- 
struction. 

The English Sunday-school, therefore, has a new problem, and to solve it we 
must go back to the ideal of Sunday itself. It should certainly release from the 
week's routine and be sacred to family life in the home, for which the best Sunday- 
school ought to be a very poor substitute. If it encourages parents to evade their 
own responsibility, as Fitch well urges, it does harm, and just in proportion as 
parents do their duty, "we may be well content in the coming century to see the 
needs for Sunday-schools steadily diminish." Its advocates often mistake means 
for ends and vaunt great numbers and assume the Sunday-school is a good thing 
itself, and thus no doubt sometimes encourage "the negligent and ignorant parents 
who are simply glad to be rid of an encumbrance on Sunday." We cannot break 
too soon with the Puritan and the Jewish Sabbath, which gives a sense of unreality 
to religion and even life. If not, as George Herbert calls the Sabbath, "the fruit 
of this, the next vrorld's bud," it ought to bring in the influence of the overthought 
and encourage larger and serious views and favor culture and poise. 

The fact that the Sunday-school teacher is not paid and is not a professional 
pedagogue but a friend, a companion devoted to conversation, ought to increase 
his influence. The Sunday-school must not be solely religious nor, save in a very 
sHght degree, theological. A part of the time might well be devoted to reading 
poems or stories with a moral meaning, and the teacher should be a sympathetic 
and effective reader. The children might describe books they have read; invent 
stories to fit pictures; have abundant suggestions from a good Sunday-school library 
as a moral safeguard. More than the day teacher, the Sunday teacher should be 
in loco parentis; should not enter upon his work in an amateurish spirit; should 
realize that his vocation is an art; interest himself in the best pedagogical literature 
and lives; never preach, but evoke interest and thought; shun all catechetical 
methods, most of all those that require simply yes or no for an answer, and next 
those that insist upon a form of words which always tend to become a substitute 



ipo EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

While I hold the Bible to be the supreme book, I have no 
language emphatic enough to denounce the pedagogic infamy- 
caused by the too common view of its uniform literal inspira- 
tion and inerrancy. The effects of teaching the historicity of 
such miracles as Jonah and the whale, the arrest of the sun, 
walking on the water, etc., is to make the fresh, eager, honest 

for thought; and yet should train the memory and fill it with choice poetic and 
proverbial expressions from the Bible, which exalt the mind, touch the heart, 
preform moral decisions. I quite agree with Fitch that stereotyped questions and 
stereotyped answers leave no room for the play of intelligence or suggestion; they 
stand between and keep apart pupil and teacher, giving the crudest instructors 
an excuse for not making questions of their own; are faulty because they require 
the children to learn the answer without learning the question; and illustrate the 
one great pedagogic disease of iron law by which methods always tend to lapse to 
verbalism and routine. Moreover, they are too abstract, and although the Church 
of England specifically enjoins open instruction and examination in the catechism 
on Sunday afternoons, the practice has lapsed, because modern tendencies have 
everywhere left this defunct device far behind. Although catechisms may have 
their place, they are not for children. The very fact, too, that results are not tested 
by examinations, but done obscurely, makes personal influence more important. 

Fitch urges teachers very strongly to inculcate only that which they believe 
themselves with all their hearts and to shun all concerning which they have private 
misgivings. He has no patience with the principles which assume that children 
should be asked to believe more than adults do, or "that it is good for them first to 
accept the traditional orthodoxy even though in after-life, when the critical faculty 
is fully awakened, their views will be corrected." Absolute candor, sincerity, 
teaching out of a full heart is necessary to prevent a sense of unreality and in- 
sincerity in the young. He doubts whether the convictions shared by the great 
body of religious adults are those taught to children as in the case of secular learn- 
ing. With this view Philhps Brooks agreed and thought it calamitous to condemn 
each generation to fight over again the battle of that which preceded with the dis- 
advantage of making this fight less strenuous, because belief was less intense to 
start with. "Never tell a child that he must beheve what you do not beheve." 
Make the Sunday-school, then, a device for bringing personal influence to bear; 
tell the things you have found most fruitful in your life; and maintain a wide mar- 
gin of individual freedom from all rules and lessons. 

This latter principle, although sound so far as it insists upon the chief gravamen 
being'laid upon what the instructor most profoundly believes, needs one important 
modification; namely, very much especially of the narrative or historical part needs 
to be impressed upon the young as literally historical and objective, which maturer 
minds have come to regard as essentially literary. It is absurd to assume that one 
cannot and should not teach the tales of Homer or even Santa Claus, and do it with 
unction and success, while the child thinks it all to be simply history, while to the 
adult it has a larger, higher meaning. 

Laurie (Method and the Sunday-School Teacher, in his Teachers' Guild Ad- 
dresses. London, 1892, p. 69) says that "the qualification and preparation of a 
Sunday-school teacher can differ only in certain details from the preparation and 
qualification of teachers generally," viz., they must know well their subject matter 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 191 

minds of children distrustful of the parents' sincerity and 
recalcitrant to their intellectual authority, suspicious of the 
church if not of religion itself, to pollute the sweet reasonable- 
ness that children bring to this subject, to burden and pervert 
the mind with casuistry and attempts at accommodation, tO' 
make instruction in these subjects not education but indoc- 

and have an earnest desire to teach it and be interested in the minds of their pupils 
first, subjects second, and themselves not at all. There must be method for all 
who would pilot to the islands of the blessed, or both teacher and taught will be 
lost on a pathless ocean. The subtleties and delicacies of spiritual Hfe make this 
the hardest kind of teaching. All clergymen should study principles and methods 
of education as part of their pastoral theology. " Soul is kindled only by soul." But 
nowhere are there such difficulties. First, the Sunday-school is voluntary; perhaps 
it should not be called a school, but should be as unlike it as possible and everything 
should be pleasant and attractive. Laurie would have no preparation of lessons, 
no tasks, no pressure, no competition, prizes, or gifts. It is a substitute for parental 
teaching and would not be necessary if parents taught the Lord's words dihgently, 
when they sit, walk, arise, and lie down. Perhaps it should be a children's service 
with moral instruction. The teacher should instill; there should be brief talks on 
the life of Christ; the teacher and pupil should read the Bible together much and 
talk on fine passages. Dogma is not only useless but hurtful for the young, and 
theology easily gets in the way of religion. The child should recognize a causal 
spirit back of all things; should aspire for unity and sonship; and should be taught 
reverence and love, because these two underlie everything. "Do not ask children 
of even fourteen years of age to learn a catechism by heart; go over it, if you think 
it necessary, or the best part of it, and see if they understand it; get the substance 
of it from them in their own words. The learning by heart of the very words is a 
curious superstition and most certainly despiritualizes." The school must attempt 
only broad, useful truths; follow Christ's way and not that of the theologian; do 
not attempt to teach that duty is easy; avoid premature training in formulas which 
are very different from broad and useful truths of religion. " Preoccupation of the 
young mind with dogma has failed to make Christendom Christian; let us try 
another and better way." 

In England education was long voluntary and largely under ecclesiastical 
control till the Act of 1870 authorized localities to establish public schools which 
should share the government grants. Thus arose a dual system. If in the new 
schools any kind of religious instruction is given, it must not be distinctive of any 
denomination and these teachers were exempt from every religious test. Local 
rate-aid was given only to schools wholly under public control. By the Balfour 
Act of 1902, aid from the government was dispensed to both classes of schools but 
by municipal councils. This was a temporary provision and satisfied neither the 
church nor the secularists, so that the Birrell Act of 1906, which went into opera- 
tion, January, 1908, or something like it, was inevitable. Under it no sectarian 
teaching can be given in any state or rate-aid school. The Cowper-Temple 
religious teaching, which is essentially bibhcal only, is all that can be taught in the 
school. Thus, every British child can now learn something of the Bible. Still, the 
local authorities were authorized, if the demand was overwhelming to dispense 
with even this, and parents may withhold their children from it. This, however, 



192 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

trination, and to implant alien constellations of ideas which 
act like foreign substances in the system. Our methods im- 
plant a morbid self-consciousness of the supernatural not felt 
about this element in Homer or the Niebelungenlied or po- 
etry, because what should be taught as literature is inculcated 
as dogma. The Freud school have Shown us the pathetic and 

is exceptional. On the other hand, if the parents of a given number of children 
wish it, denominational teaching may be provided not more than two mornings a 
week for those desiring it, but not at public expense. Thus, in the transferred 
schools additional facilities for theological and sectarian training may be furnished 
and in rural districts the secular teacher may volunteer. While this scheme may 
be a step toward disestablishment or disendowment, it involves nothing that can be 
fairly called confiscation, as some extremists of the aggrieved minority claim. It 
only applies the broad principle that state subventions or local taxation cannot 
go to denominational teaching. Very partial analogies to such state assumption 
were seen after the war of 1870 when the German provincial universities, if they 
accepted imperial aid, must submit in some measure to imperial inspection and 
control; also in this country in the opportunity of colleges if they drop their sectarian 
characteristics to profit by the Carnegie Retiring pension, and again in the feebly 
endowed New England private academies, which have become public schools. 
It is too soon to learn whether under this system the Bible itself will become better 
known than heretofore. Claims both ways are made. One thing is certain, viz., 
that the dominant sentiment of the British people as expressed by Parliament 
favors teaching the Bible itself without theological implications. As compared 
with the systems of other lands this is a unique and significant departure. The 
Separation Law of 1905 e. g., in France, which went into effect December 10, 
1906, was far more revolutionary, not only because it abrogated a concordat which 
had been in operation for one hundred and four years, but because it more com- 
pletely secularized the new public education, making no provision for Bible teach- 
ing but substituting ethical and civic for religious education. 

The battle over elementary education in England has led to the formation of a 
parents' league the purpose of which is to maintain the rights of the parent to 
determine the religious education of his children in the lower schools. It has 
now some 80,000 members and professes attachment to no political party or special 
religious school of thought. 

In this country S. P. Delany (Morality and the Public Schools. Education, 
1907-8, vol. 28, pp. 97-1 12) proposes that American school children be allowed, with- 
out detriment to their standing, to absent themselves half a day each week to attend 
religious instruction in their own churches. This arrangement might be made by 
legislation or by local agreement. It should be limited to children of certain age, say 
through the first two years of the high school, or it might be open to all. As children 
or their parents can choose among various subjects, why not arrange for this? The 
plan would place the responsibility of moral and religious training for children 
where it belongs — with their parents. Some churches could afford trained and 
even paid teachers. The pastor should take interest in it. The scheme is by no 
means new, but has been advocated on several occasions by clergymen of various 
denominations and by others. The scheme, it was said, would rid us of the perni- 
cious idea that religion is for Sunday alone. It would give the churches something 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I93 

even mentally degenerative influence we often entail upon 
childhood by the stork legend and our other evasions and 
hypocrisies about sex and reproduction when childish curiosity 
begins to center about the problem of the origin of life, and 
have detailed the results of repression which often become 
neurotic symptoms, all of which the simple truth told in time 

more to do with education. It is claimed that no reform movement in education 
has enlisted the sympathy of so many religious bodies. Some have thought this 
would gradually do away with parochial schools. Pessimists have said that with- 
out such a scheme this country would be either Catholic or heathen. It certainly 
would not divide children into religious groups, nor interrupt the regular studies of 
the school, nor does it involve an abdication by the state of its function of educa- 
tion or a confession of incompetence. The plan needs to be supplemented to make 
provision for children who have no church connections and for whom it cannot be 
claimed that our national religion is Christianity. It would doubtless reform our 
Sunday-school system. 

The fourth general convention of the Religious Educational Association at Roch- 
ester in February, 1907, shows wholesome growth. Its purpose is "to inspire 
the educational forces of our country with the rehgious ideal; and to keep before the 
public mind the ideals of religious education and the sense of its need and value." 
The three hundred and fifty delegates from the twenty-two states representing 
very divergent ideals, indulged in no controversy. They agreed in the exaltation 
of Christ, not doctrinally but as a vital fact of personal life. Philanthropy has 
taken the place of theology and the heart is making the theologian. Perhaps this 
Association often tends to be forensic, but it is nevertheless interesting and sig- 
nificant, but has so far little to show in the way of results. 

It is to be regretted that the Y. M. C. A. has not made itself slightly more in- 
dependent of its evangelical basis but remains so nearly on the old foundations. 
When it ceases to apply dogmatic tests its efficiency will greatly increase. L. E. 
Day (Religious Education. Association Seminar, 1906, vol. 15, pp. 17-31; 62-72) 
conceives religion as man's God-impelled effort to come into complete harmony 
with his environment. He thinks education has no meaning apart from religion. 
The former is conditioned by the continuity of society. C. W. Votaw, a good 
representative of this curriculum (Association Seminar, March, 1908), postulates a 
curriculum that shall rouse moral purpose, inform and train moral judgment, teach 
laws of physical and mental health, and secure their observation, inculcate self- 
respect and the dignity and worth of manhood, establish right habits of thought 
on social and civic problems, cultivate right feelings in all relations of life, develop 
and train the will to right motives and choices for individual and social welfare, 
to stimulate and direct social impulses, promote brotherliness in class groups, give 
a wider, practical, first-hand knowledge of present-day needs and opportunities, 
conduct work, awaken the religious nature. 

J. V. Collins (Religious Education and the Sunday-school. Educational Re- 
view, March, 1909, vol. 37, pp. 271-283) finds only one solution of present condi- 
tions feasible, viz., "a two- or three-hour session on Sunday instead of an hour session 
as now, with changes in the administration of schools to correspond." This would 
involve a study period, smaller recitation rooms, more teachers and grades. Per- 
haps the teacher should be released from all church service. Sunday would be less 
14 



194 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

would avoid. In religious pedagogy the results are analogous 
but more diffuse. In Italy, Jordan and Labanca ^ have shown 
how the long struggle between clericalism and liberalism has 
made even the teaching and study of religious psychology 
impossible in all the state universities, despite many attempts 
to establish it, because everything bearing the name of re- 
ligion suggests dogma to Italian youth, who are in a state of 
morbid revolt against all that smacks of ecclesiasticism. So 
for children our methods early alienate them from a topic nat- 
urally of supreme interest, because they are thus compelled to 
carry on a double housekeeping and swallow an undigested 

dreary for the children. The plan could best be begun in communities where the 
religious tone is good. 

The Sunday-school is isolated in time and place and because the Bible is thought 
so unique. Hence, its antiquated methods. E. P. St. John (Criticism of Present 
Sunday-school Fads, Curriculum, and Grades, with Demonstration of Text-books, 
Fed. Sem., Dec, 1909, vol. 16, pp. 519-522) weighs historical, geographic, photo- 
graphic, dramatic, ecclesiastical methods suggested. He would begin religious 
education with nature worship or study, then mythology, then something Hke magic 
or man's control of the gods, then the idea of obedience instead of control, and 
lastly should come an aspirational type. 

Dr. R. M. Hodge (The Development of Social Consciousness in the Sunday- 
school, Ped. Sem., Dec, 1909, vol. 16, pp. 523-529) seems to think that the in- 
dividualistic standpoint in character building is almost entirely obsolete and that 
our very consciousness must be social; that in religion we simply add and include 
God in our democracy. He does not think that it is democratic that the super- 
intendent should have so much executive and legislative power. He is now a czar 
who paroles his douma. The real Sunday-school should be a faculty with a con- 
sciousness of its own. The class should vote on festivals, picnics, raising and use 
of mon.ey, should be organized, keep its records, have free discussion. All should 
begin with class consciousness. The individual code of honor should be a by- 
product of the class code. The Sunday-school building should be modeled on the 
best school buildings. 

R. G. Clapp (New Departures in Sunday-school Pedagogy, Ped. Sem., Dec, 
1909, vol. 16, pp. 530-536) describes the Kent System at New Haven of having 
one director for different Sunday-schools. This has been successful for three 
years. Teachers from half a dozen churches meet under one leadership, graded 
according to the age of the children taught. Kent and Coe are developing a new 
series of lessons of seventeen grades from ages four to twenty-one, with electives 
for adults, on the basis of child psychology. Non-Biblical sources are used. Chil- 
dren are often graded as they are in the day schools. At the age of thirteen the 
hero-worshiping instinct is given a rich pabulum in the biographies of great men, 
and this is continued during the fourteenth and fifteenth years and at sixteen, the 
age of most frequent conversions, it culminates in the life of Jesus. 

^Jordan, L. H., and Labanca, B. A Study of Religion in the Italian Uni- 
versities. Lond., Froud, 1909, 324 p. 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN I95 

bolus of creed, or else join the ranks of the indifferent or 
hostile. The supernatural addresses the heart only and not 
the intellect; and every effort to force it upon the tender soul 
of youth against ingenuous doubt makes havoc with belief in 
the actual objectivity of all that is incredible to the naive 
logic of childhood, taints the very sense of truth itself, re- 
presses rather than stimulates psychic growth and, instead of 
advancing unity of soul, cleaves the mind and heart in two 
and gives two standards, or else implants aversion to authority 
of parents and religious teachers, and hostility, perhaps too 
deep to be conscious at first, toward all the great verities of 
faith, contempt for litanies, and a complacent ignorance of the 
grandest of all the historic traditions of the race and its sacred 
documents. This evil is so vast and deep that its full purport 
is little seen by the pedagogic laity; and the church needs a 
great awakening from its long dogmatic slumbers if it is to 
save childhood and youth from the skepticism of which its 
own fondly cherished methods, and not science or philosophy, 
are the chief cause. 

Here, too, the ideal, though it is a far-distant goal, is to 
repeat in wisely formulated ways the history of the race. Act- 
ing under this rubric we should learn how first to lay broad 
and deep the foundations on which religion rests, and which 
can be established only in early childhood in love and admira- 
tion of nature, and in the passion to be of service to others. 
All the differentiations even between the great ethnic re- 
ligions should come a little later, and yet later those between 
Catholicism and Protestantism and Judaism, which spring 
from common psychological, as well as historic, roots ; while 
last of all, because genetically latest, should come, if they are 
taught at all, denominational differences, all of which are 
slight and insignificant as compared with the above basal and 
generic teachings. For the young, as for pagans in the mis- 
sionary field, all sectarian differences should be waived or con- 
cealed as long as possible, for they are at best only tiny twigs 
of a season's growth on the grand old tree of religion. If the 
child must be first pagan, make it a good pagan at that stage, 
for only thus and then will it be qualified to go on to higher 
things. Give supernaturalism its innings in this nascent sea- 
son, but realize that all its forms are in their nature decadent. 



196 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

like leaves, and must fall, but will leave the parent stem 
stronger and larger with each crop grown and shed. Re- 
ligious growth means constant change, incessant new insights 
and beliefs ripening one after another, and constant substitu- 
tions of more for less perfect forms. Religion is the apex of 
humanistic culture, and needs eternal revision. To be eter- 
nally working over the formulae of belief and the ritual of 
acts and conduct expressive of it is the very essence of spir- 
itual growth, and dispensation must succeed dispensation in 
both the individual soul and the race ; for the growth of really 
and truly religious ideas and ideals is the very best index and 
measure of progress, the impulse of which must always have 
the right of way over everything else in the expanding mind 
and heart, even if the ultimate goal to be attained remains be- 
yond our ken " Like some far-off divine event toward which 
the whole creation moves." 

The debt of education to Christianity was incalculable. 
Jesus was a great teacher, brought a new doctrine and rule of 
life, his parables are portative, pedagogic devices more plain 
and effective than Plato's myths. His disciples preached and 
taught. Origen called the holy spirit the divine pedagogue, 
and Tertullian regarded its still small voice as a new muse of 
truth. When, in 529 a.d., Justinian's famous edict closed the 
four great schools of classical philosophy, the church took pos- 
session of the world of culture, became the great patron of 
learning, wrought out a new philosophy, and established a 
score of great universities before the year 1400, while, ear- 
lier yet, Charlemagne and Alcuin had established the clois- 
ter cathedral, and other lower schools, where reading, writ- 
ing, and the seven liberal arts were taught. For centuries 
liberty of teaching and learning was almost complete, and 
Protestants are prone to do scant justice to the educational 
foundations laid by the Catholic Church in its great formative 
period. When she began to grow suspicious of new learning, 
and the Renaissance and Reformation arose, we find Luther, 
Erasmus, Calvin, and Melanchthon establishing schools and re- 
constructing courses, and nearly twoscore new universities 
were founded by this influence. It was again profoundly felt 
that education was the hope and method of Christianity, and 
that ignorance and superstition were the parents of sin; that 



■^ 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN i97 

enlightenment was the best and surest way to bring man to 
true rehgion. Thus, almost down to our own time, the clergy 
have been the chief teachers, leaders, and inspirers of most of 
the best things done in education. This was true of Catholics, 
Lutherans, Puritans, Anglicans, and the rest. Very many sec- 
ondary schools and still more colleges, in this country, owe 
their origin to religious belief. One of the first articles thus 
in the unwritten creed of Christendom has been Education. 
Even when the influence of the clergy began to decline in the 
higher academic grades of culture, they were in all Christian 
lands long its chief representatives to the masses, and estab- 
lished and directed elementary schools. 

Now in all Christian lands, and especially among Protes- 
tants, the educational supremacy of the clergy is in a state of 
rapid decline. There has been a growing aversion to clerical 
influence, and secularization has long been the ideal in many 
places. The clergy should awake to the situation betimes. We 
would not minimize, but magnify, their efficacy in doing the 
Master's work among the poor, in slums, the influence of the 
pulpit against corporate greed, oppression, industrial malprac- 
tice, social evil, political corruption. The church not only 
prays, but works; but no one denies that its efficacy is vastly 
below its great traditions in the past. Meanwhile, with the 
development of secular education, there has grown in every 
land an increase in divorce in which this country leads, having 
more courts and cases than all the rest of the world, so that 
the proportion is fast approaching one tenth of all who marry. 
We lead in homicides, averaging ten thousand per year; less 
than five per cent are being caught and punished, as against 
over ninety per cent in Germany. The percentage of juvenile 
crime is rising, hoodlumism, general feralization of youth, 
child labor, the daily chronicle of crime and vice in the " yel- 
low " press, and the many statistics of juvenile immorality re- 
veal the gravity of the moral situation. 

One thing the churches might do — and that is, while main- 
taining as long as they will their denominational differences of 
creed and forms of worship on Sunday, to formulate a pro- 
gramme of week-day work in education in the broadest sense 
of that word and open their splendid property to all who 
can use it aright, day and evening, leaving trinity, incarna- 



198 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tion, revelation, miracles, salvation in another world, and all 
other dogmas, however precious to believers, to be chiefly 
Lord's-day matters. Let the church waive all these distinctive 
doctrines during the week and seek ways and means of con- 
certed effort, and reassert its ancient function of caring for 
and guiding the soul of youth and inspiring it to moral and 
personal enthusiasm, for pure, true living on this earth. It 
is by its own deterioration, from overinsistence upon doctrines 
and belief, its diminished interest in science, and in social re- 
forms, that it has forfeited to the state its natural function of 
moral training, which the state is trying so bravely, but as yet 
with unsatisfactory results, tO' perform. This situation gives 
the church a remarkable new opportunity for reasserting its 
lost functions. Putting aside all claim of ecclesiastical author- 
ity and every theological shibboleth, and animated by simple, 
fervent love of man and by the crying moral needs of the 
present, can it not again set the world an example of supreme 
service in a crisis of dire need? To do this, it must abandon 
once and forever the old uncompromising spirit that demands 
all or nothing, and realize that absolute truth and virtue are 
rarely attainable on this earth, and understand profoundly that 
the second, third, or twentieth best is vastly better than noth- 
ing at all, and is very well worth doing. If the state will not 
tolerate theology or even the reading of the Bible, whence has 
come the world's greatest inspiration for righteousness and 
which is the chief text-book of psychology, then let it study the 
methods of introducing carefully selected ethical readers made 
by religious men from the most inspiring classical literature 
and perhaps the Bibles of other lands. If we are not ready 
for the German simuUan schools by which Protestants and 
Catholics combine their pedagogic efforts on a few funda- 
mentals, at least some Protestant sects might begin by increas- 
ing their efforts in the mission field, sharing the maintenance 
of expensive sectarian organizations there. They might, as 
some are doing, de-denominationalize each of their colleges, 
and seek by so doing to confirm, deepen, and broaden their 
common Christian character. The state, neither here nor in 
any land, will ever again tolerate any creed or confession. Its 
religion is patriotism, and the school is now its nursery, as 
the church was of piety. Science, too, w^ll never assent to the 



THE RELIGIOUS TRAINING OF CHILDREN 199 

dogmatic method ; but Christianity should not be expurgated 
from the art, rehgion, history, humanities, which it has done 
so much all these centuries to create, and without which even 
they cannot rightly be understood, and lacking some knowl- 
edge or feeling for which our children are not unlike deaf- 
mutes studying music. Better virtue without Christianity than 
Christianity without virtue, if such an antithesis ever become 
necessary so that we must choose between these two. Why 
should we not recognize the God of things as they are and, 
accepting the inevitable with what joy we can, according to 
the old Stoic maxim, try to rise to the opportunity of leading 
this great and impending movement for moral education, more 
pressing and promising than anything else in the history of 
the schools for the last century, and ourselves work out a 
programme, godless and even Bibleless if it must be in name, 
utilizing to the uttermost the sentiments of mutual help, social 
service, honor, patriotism, pagan though they be in origin, 
realizing that Christianity itself is not all ecclesiastical or the- 
ological, but that a purely secular week-day religion can and 
must be wrought out, and that the detailed methods for so 
doing are already within sight and reach. The institutional 
church has many a lesson we must heed. 



CHAPTER V 

MORAL EDUCATION 

Philosophical basis — The ethical culture movement — International con- 
gress — Morals without religion in Japan and France — Epitome of 
the views of many writers — Need of moral education and of larger 
views on morals — Effects of feminism — Difference of sexes — Mother 
■ and child — Flogging, scolding, praise, fighting, revenge, stealing — 
Acquaintance with badness — Companions — Truancy — Honoring par- 
ents — Bravery — Justice — Moral topics in the curriculum — Industrial 
training — Reform schools — Physical education — Habits and morals — 
Sophistication of conscience — Honor — Mastery and specialization — 
Effects of the long vacation, of absence of families in summer — Child 
labor — Social workers and psychological experts for schools — Corre- 
lating agencies — Laziness as a root of immorality — Pupil self-govern- 
ment in the grades, high school and college — The pedagogy of 
juvenile crime and court — Youth our chief national resource. 

This is considered the most vital and the most difficult of 
all the many vast problems now before the American people. 
It is not for educators alone, but for the nation to solve. It 
is the problem in which all the deep questions touching the 
perpetuity of our race and people culminate, and one in which 
a great awakening seems by every sign to impend. Already 
the literature in the field is enormous, the partial schemes 
many, and the interest almost daily broadening and deepening, 
although we do not as yet fully see all the dimensions of the 
problem. 

The Background. — Education seeks to fashion and fur- 
nish an environment of facilitization for the development 
of all the best human possibilities up to their maximal maturity 
and power. From the standpoint of pragmatism (which is 
nothing but pedagogy asserting its sovereignty throughout the 
whole field of culture), one is almost tempted to say that the 
soul can no longer be regarded as unitary, but as a manifold 
or congeries of souls. At any rate, the term " Individuum " 



MORAL EDUCATION 201 

is no longer applicable, as personality is made up of various 
elemental psyches, few in some, many in others, now com- 
pactly and. now very loosely constellated, some of them per- 
sistently repressed and others forced and overstimulated like 
the various ids and determinants of somatic heredity. Traits, 
characters, attributes, faculties, marks, propensities, etc., are 
often so flimsily knit together in it that they can vary more or 
less independently of each other under the influence of train- 
ing and environment, so that the cultivation of one may have 
little or no effect upon that of the others, and may even check 
their unfoldment. Thus, in the light of many careful recent 
researches, it seems somewhat doubtful whether there are 
studies that develop, or tests that can measure, general ability. 
Thus, practically at least, the soul may now be regarded as 
composite rather than monadic, and hence ideally there are as 
many educations as there are diversities in the make-up of 
human nature. 

Again, certain elemental human traits suggest and perhaps 
go back to a few of the instinctive prehuman animal types 
which run parallel with morphological distinctions. Each ani- 
mal group may represent some quality in great excess, the 
high selective value of which made possible the development 
and survival of a species, genus, or more probably a group ; as, 
e. g., aggressiveness in the carnivora, timidity, deceit, or cun- 
ning in animals long preyed upon, etc. Each trait is thus a 
fulfilled possibility of evolution in some specific direction. 
Now, when, by the study also of the forms of degeneration in 
man or by that of markedly peculiar children, we find con- 
vergence or similarity of these three fields, investigated inde- 
pendently of each other, it would seem that we are really 
approaching a true alphabet or stoichiology of character or 
ethology in the sense that Stuart Mill first conceived it. 
Among the hundreds of thousands of animal forms, each hav- 
ing evolved its adaptations by stimuli and reductives, and by 
trial and error, into codes of food-getting, reproduction, 
group organization, etc., it is impossible not to believe that 
such very fundamental traits as sympathy, pride, desire of 
ownership, irascibility, the instinct of leadership, and many 
other moral and immoral traits are so persistent because 
they have been making through the geologic ages, and 



202 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

have behind them a strong hereditary, phyletic momentum. 
Thus, when we deal with such impulsions, the scruple of 
Plato, whether virtue can be taught, is inevitable. What- 
ever religion may be able to do, moralism is not yet far 
advanced in the art of analyzing or synthetizing such paleo- 
psychic traits, or even in regulating what Bahnsen called 
their posodynism or dosage. Neither can it transmute the 
four temperaments of the old phrenologists, which modern 
studies of disposition are rehabilitating, or change the con- 
genital eye-, ear,- or motor-mindedness or innate proclivity 
to certain moods, feelings, emotions, or sentiments. Con- 
cerning all this field, psychology is now realizing how little 
it knows or can do. It is because the soul has so many 
strains, old and new, braided, woven, or felted together 
in so many ways, some of which are integrated as with bonds 
of fate, while others are very liable to se junction, that the 
systems of moral training can at best educate only parts of the 
soul in certain ways and for certain times ; while teachers in 
this field, far more often than in others, realize the limitations 
that bafiie all the resources of their craft. Loyalty and treach- 
ery, naivete and innate Blasiertheit, hashiulness and effrontery, 
love and hate, self-repression and habitual abandon, chronic 
timidity and fearlessness, kindness and cruelty, spirituality 
and sensuality, temperance and passion, inclinations to solitude 
or society, caution and recklessness, conservatism and radical- 
ism, squandering and miserliness, prudery and shamelessness, 
truthfulness and falsity, etc.; indeed, even such philosophical 
characters as are expressed by such terms as dogmatist, skeptic, 
stoic, idealist, sensualist, realist, positivist, and all the rest; 
even qualities so nondescript and outre that only " slanguage " 
can describe them — cad, mucker, slob, mope, yap, hobo, flunky, 
shrew, hag, poser, hustler, quitter, prig, guy, plunger, rubber; 
or animal names applied to human beings — mule, cat, hog, 
dove, peacock, goose, fly, fox, vixen, lion, eagle, jay, viper, 
clam, lobster, and countless more — the mere suggestion of all 
these is sufficient to show how populous with the possibilities 
of character, good and bad, the soul is, and how inveterately 
and fatefully it is dowered, and amidst what limitations there- 
fore the work of moral nurture must be carried on, and how 
grave the danger that any and every leash may be slipped and 



MORAL EDUCATION 203 

vicious, if not feral, instincts break away from all regulations 
and run riot. 

Kant and the phrenologists, also Lotze, Bain, and now 
Perez, Paulhan, Feuillet, Ribot, Malapert, and Lang, in their 
studies of character, have all of them attempted little but classi- 
fications, some of them quite elaborate. But to-day individual 
psychology, although so much of it is devoted to exceptional 
or abnormal cases, is going back to nature, laying broader 
foundations, and bringing in the evolutionary perspective, un- 
til, through archaeology and the remains of savage life, we 
are beginning to glimpse the still more remote and larger back- 
ground of comparative psychology. Thus, we are realizing 
that the more basal human traits are the older and more ani- 
mal in their origin, and that in general the more educable of 
man's qualities are those that are latest acquired. Thus, al- 
though man's is only one of the types of mind in the world, 
it rests back upon a wide biological basis common to all the 
types of mind. Some psychic traits are as clear-cut as physical 
functions like respiration, and probably as old and as unmodi- 
fiable, while other nascent ones are as amorphous and plastic 
as codes of etiquette. Thus, if we assume that the sphere of 
moral education covers precept, discipline, habituation, train- 
ing, regimen, manners, deportment, etc., wide as this makes 
its sphere, it is yet small compared with the whole of man's 
psychic life. While religion and perhaps psychotherapy may 
often control some of the older and stronger energies of the 
soul than the best morals can reach, there stretch beyond 
both of them ranges of psychic life, the betterment of which 
is desirable and conceivable if the superman is ever to arrive, 
or if man is ever to approach perfection of body and soul in a 
perfect community in which all the best possibilities of both 
shall be fully realized and all the worst eliminated. Neither 
young nor old should lose the splendid ancient vision that has 
inspired so many of the prophets, saints, and apostles of 
righteousness, viz., of some ideal state, commonwealth, or 
millennium, city or kingdom of God, Utopia, etc., where most 
ethical characters and organizations are found. In the pain- 
ful struggle for slight, gradual amelioration of present evils, 
we should keep some dream chamber in our many-mansioned 
soul, where we can occasionally retire and revel in the imag- 



204 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

inations of perfection, and hearten ourselves by yielding 
to the fancy of all good wishes fulfilled and all high ideals 
realized. 

The attitude of thoroughbred moralism of to-day, as culled 
from the utterances of some of its leading representatives, may 
be roughly characterized by phrases like the following: Why 
waste goodness and love on God who is a distant, perhaps a 
schematic and even imaginary being, and who, if He exists, 
has no need of our help, while our fellow men are in direst 
need of it? How much better mankind would be if all the 
service that had been lavished upon and the sacrifice offered 
to God had been turned to the benefit of our own species? To 
say that man has no rights as against God is treason to the 
race. Virtues are not means to some end beyond our ken, but 
ends in themselves. Complete human life is the supreme good. 
Hope of future rewards and fears of penalties in another life 
are unworthy motives which make goodness impure ; they are 
selfishness for two worlds instead of for one. Pragmatism 
smalls down the divine and makes it the soul of this earth, or 
at least of the solar system, and this helps a little from vasta- 
tion or dissipation of moral energy into the infinities. Man is 
not justified by faith, but by works, and perhaps Gesinmmgen. 
Who cares whether the cosmic order itself is moral or not? 
It is enough that the social order be so. Not sacrifice and ab- 
negation, but the fullest self-realization should be our aim. 
Let our leaders be the faithful Eckhardts of the people, quick- 
ening their conscience, and always alert for their betterment. 
It is a far cry to any of the ultimates or absolutes, whether 
conceived as metaphysical entities or as abstract perfection, 
first cause, truth, summum bonum, or as any or all products 
of theological or philosophical percolation ; but to do our pres- 
ent duty should be our religion, and to render help is better 
than worship. Love diffused to all being is too tenuous and 
inefficient, and, indeed, it should not be extended too far on 
the present earth, but our moral endeavors should be concen- 
trated to those we can really serve. As to the clergy and 
the church, they have had their opportunity, and failed; they 
have not saved modern society, and so let us turn to temporal, 
secular, and mundane agencies and see what moral power can 
be evolved from them ! We derogate virtue if we assume that 



MORAL EDUCATION 205 

it depends upon religion, and has no independent motivation 
of its own. Man's destiny is not conditioned upon a celestial 
transaction or on an historic tragedy, nor are any of the genu- 
ine merits vicarious; these fitted only a mythological stage, 
and are the baby talk of ethics that is outgrown by all who 
come to full maturity. If there ever was a God, even though 
He be now dead, He may have given man the light within, 
but it is there, at any rate, and is a sufficient guide, or else 
He did His work badly. Out of human nature as it is, all can 
be made that man needs. All that the church now requires 
can be based on an innate moral law not contingent upon any 
beliefs or theories. The codes of conduct sanctioned by the 
old religions are now quite inadequate to meet the complex 
needs of modern life, practical philanthropy, and reform. Do- 
ing right deeds is an organ of knowing true creeds. There 
must be not only moral endeavor but passion, and right living 
is the real religion of rational man. Some claim that with 
this spirit the church of the future, if it has a future, must be 
animated — that no one can become truly religious until he has 
accumulated considerable personal experience in moralizing 
himself and his environment. Even if Christianity itself was 
the original ethical-culture society, the movement has far out- 
grown it, so that it has mainly an antiquarian interest for the 
modern moralist, who must seek to better the world by purely 
natural, human means. A few speak of an ethical church with 
morality as its God, somewhat as Goethe said that science and 
art w^ere his religion. 

In 1893 Desjardins organized a " Society for Moral Ac- 
tion," a term its members preferred to " Ethical Culture." 
Their aim was personal moral improvement by doing " the 
present duty." Only by " acting the moral with all one's 
might " can intellectual doubts be cleared up, or an inner 
Christianity elaborated apart from historical and metaphysical 
dogmas. " An interior Christ " must be discovered or built 
up, or both. Vital faith is as incommunicable by words and 
as inexpressible in formulae as character. Otherwise, one need 
only to be able to read in order to believe. Real skepticism is 
incompleteness of life, while true faith is realized only in con- 
duct. By willing spiritually the right and good at every step 
with originality and individual initiative, by becoming our own 



2o6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

masters, lawgivers yet law-bound, by the daily practice of 
daily sacrifice, service, and purity, we generate in our inner 
experience all the essentials that religion characterizes as re- 
demption, faith, grace, regeneration, etc., and realize that the- 
ology is only the attempt to describe the higher life of the soul 
in objective terms. Its phrases express the palpitating realities 
of the psychic life; but, like paper currency, the impressions 
become faded, they wear out, and need to be cashed in or re- 
solved back to their specie basis. 

In Germany, von Egedy ^ represents the culmination of an 
ethical-culture movement, which, as here and in England and 
France, has a very small but very select following (hardly 
more than from three thousand to five thousand in either land). 
It is not for children, much as all these societies concern them- 
selves for their moral training, but is preeminently for the 
most mature, adult, cultivated, male mind. It is significant 
that the German movement flowers in men like the astronomer 
Furster and von Egedy, who find the religious element indis- 
pensable. For the latter, Christianity is essentially an allegory 
that needs to be transmuted into life. Those who are most 
orthodox and to whom religious facts or principles are most 
extraneous, absolute, theological, know least of it, far less even 
than the sinner who knows, in his own life, the eternal powers, 
and feels deeply, although he may resist their truth. This is 
neo-Christianism, which insists that ethical aspirations and in- 
sights proceed from the depths of the soul, individual and 
social, just as they created Christianity out of themselves, and 
must now resorb and recast it again. Though the forms of 
both piety and conduct be changed in the processes of adjust- 
ment to modern times, and though there be genuine enlarge- 
ment and aggressive development, the substance remains un- 
changed. The best of the neo-Christians seek to make and to 
keep themselves more acutely sensitive to moral distinctions, 
in and about them, than others. They dread acquiescence. 
They burn to know the good and to do the right. They would 
be moral saints, ethical revivalists, not slaves but the apostles 
and the evangelists of duty, and would make doing the good 

^ See Meyerhardt, M. W., The Movement for Ethical Culture at Home and 
Abroad. American Journal of Religious Psychology and Education, May, 1908, 
vol. 3, pp. 71-153. 



MORAL EDUCATION 207 

the organ of knowing the truth. They are no Eremites but 
keenly feel the great evils in our public and private life, and 
will not grow complacent as they grow familiar with them ; but 
they would reform the world by the slow methods of personal 
endeavor and example and do not expect revolution or social 
upheaval, much as they exhort great deeds by great men. 
Neither material nor scientific progress is secure unless moral 
improvement goes along with it, and because it does not and 
has not done so, they feel that the present situation is very pre- 
carious. They would, however, ameliorate the present condi- 
tion by educating the young. But the material they work with 
is too refined and their methods precociously subjective for 
children, while very much that is essential to the growing mind 
is so transmuted that it seems omitted. Thus, their work of 
moral education lacks at once fervor and objectivity. Perhaps 
no men, not even the Stoic sages, have arisen to greater moral 
altitudes or have been more smitten with the sense of the 
transcendent beauty of the good life, or realize more completely 
that virtue is not a gift freely imparted but a prize to be won 
by long, unremitting toil. Few, too, have succeeded for them- 
selves in so far eliminating the supernatural, so that little sense 
of it is left in their own minds ; but children need much of it 
and in crass form, as a provocative for self-knowledge. Re- 
ligion is at root the most precious experience of the race — i. e., 
it is ethical experience transmitted and essentially inherited. 
Without this, moral teaching leaves the children cold, in- 
structed but not impelled, ripe when they should be still in the 
green. 

Anticlericalism and antiecclesiasticism have, in Germany, 
France, and England, fused to some extent with socialism and 
labor movements and entered politics ; and many and bitter 
have been the denunciations of established religion by those 
who are sincerely devoted to the moral betterment of mankind. 
But more and more, even among leaders at first hostile, is 
growing the conviction that religion itself in some form is an 
inexpugnable element of all moral education for the young, 
and that its pedagogical uses cannot be entirely dispensed 
with. 

In New York in 1907 the societies for ethical culture of 
that city, Chicago, St. Louis, and Philadelphia were federated 



2o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

as the American Ethical Union. They unanimously refused to 
be a religious organization, and yet a representative speaker 
declared that ethical religion is the necessary crown and com- 
pletion of religious thought; and again, " Our success depends 
on whether we are religious." Again, " What social effort 
needs to-day is religion." Again, " The appeal of the moral 
ideal for social service is the appeal of religion." Dr. Adler 
closed with a fervid call, when the world is now rocking as in 
an earthquake, to a religious ministry of such ethical preaching 
as that of the prophet Isaiah, and bloodguiltiness is risked if 
we refuse this call. Wundt declares that the moral ideal be- 
longs to the realm of the infinite. 

The International Congress on Moral Education, held in 
London, September 25-29, 1908, brought together representa- 
tives of eighteen nations, thirteen universities, and official dele- 
gates from over a hundred educational organizations, who lis- 
tened to some one hundred and twenty papers printed in its 
proceedings.^ There was very great diversity of opinion. In- 
deed, Sadler,^ its English leader, says " There was no general 
agreement." Along with intense sincerity there was also mu- 
tual respect, and the temper of controversy was restrained and 
deep-seated prejudices softened, so that some went away with 
the optimistic hope of an ultimate synthesis of apparently op- 
posed teachings. Perhaps the most deep-seated divergences 
were on the cjuestion of the relations of moral to religious edu- 
cation, as to the value of systematic and direct versus indirect 
and incidental moral instruction, and whether the great Eng- 
lish public schools fostered a sense of civic obligation. The 
profound English movement toward the secularization of edu- 
cation had aroused public interest to a high pitch and did much 
to make this, the eleventh International Congress held in Lon- 
don during the year, the most impressive of all for the press 
and the people. After listening to several able papers by 
eminent representatives of the Catholic, Anglican, and various 
independent churches, it must have been a solemn and im- 

^ Papers on moral education communicated to the First International Moral 
Education Congress in London. Edited by Gustav Spiller. London, David 
Nutt, 1908, 404 p. 

2 Sadler, M. E., The International Congress on Moral Education, International 
Journal of Ethics, 1908-9, vol. 19, pp. 158-72. 



MORAL EDUCATION 209 

pressive moment when the venerable M. Buisson, representing 
France, presented the conckision of that country that morals 
could now be effectively taught on a purely secular basis with- 
out any aid from or sanctions of religion, and recounted in 
brief and eloquent words the movement in this direction which 
took form in the organic law of 1886 that separated public 
education from ecclesiastical influence. Many Anglo-Saxons 
had not before fully realized what the religion of duty and of 
socialism meant, nor understood the magnitude or momentum 
of the movement by which the state is now slowly assuming 
the function of training for virtue, a task which the church had 
so long claimed as its own. Grave and solemn as this issue 
is becoming for the world to-day, the dominant sentiment in 
England, and to a great extent in this country, was well voiced 
by the aged Bishop of Hereford at the close of the debate on 
this subject, who said, " The religious teacher and the moral 
teacher have the same need, the same end, which is to build 
up conduct and character and good purpose in the child. . . . 
I would venture, as an old man, to suggest to the young teach- 
ers who are enthusiastic for moral teaching and afraid of re- 
ligious teaching that the difference between the two might be 
expressed by the difference between the circle and the parabola. 
In the circle you confine yourself to what is within a limited 
boundary. In the parabola you have on one side this same 
limited boundary, but on the other it reaches out to the infi- 
nite. . . . Whether we are teaching religion or teaching moral- 
ity, let us remember that in the teaching of these things the 
best of our teachers will rise till they touch the spheres." 
Buisson expresses the same sentiment. " Science does not ex- 
haust the real, nor conscience the ideal." Religion is needed 
" to unite the good, beautiful, and true into one supreme and 
perfect unity, which religion designates as God." 

In America the Religious Education Association was 
founded " to inspire the educational forces of our country with 
the religious ideal and the religious forces of our country with 
the educational ideal." Its representatives believe that educa- 
tion must be more spiritual and religion more intelligent to 
resist the commercializing, not to say vulgarizing, influences 
of American life. This association has over two thousand 
members, has held five conventions, at which several hundred 
15 



2IO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

addresses were given, printed five volumes and many thousand 
pamphlets, and has held conferences and made investigations 
of religious conditions, and has had on the whole a most 
wholesome, if not as yet a very potent influence upon Ameri- 
can education. 

Japan. — Speaking of those systems that go furthest in dis- 
pensing with religion, Japan seems now to have in most re- 
spects the best organized, most detailed, and efficient of all sys- 
tems of moral education, and no other nation makes this so car- 
dinal. For seven centuries education w^as based on Confucius, 
whose teachings are essentially ethical, who ignored every- 
thing supernatural, had no use for gods or a future life, but 
made conduct basal. With the Miegi reformation in 1868 
education was reconstructed and made more intellectual save 
in its moral aspect, but here no European models were found 
that were deemed worthy, and so the culture of virtue did not 
advance, and for twenty years there was growing confusion 
in theory and practice. Western theories of ethics were stud- 
ied and found their partisans. Herbart's Gesinnungs-Unter- 
richt was introduced in some quarters, while Buddhism and 
Christianity were both advocated, even by those who did not 
believe them to be final, as the best practical bases for morals. 
Then came the epoch-making edict of the Mikado in 1890, 
less than half a page of this volume in length, which is not 
only a remarkable document in itself, but was received al- 
most as a revelation from on hig-h. It demanded training 
in loyalty, reverence, patriotism, filial piety, moderation, cour- 
age, etc., according to the traditions of ancient times and the 
spirit of the constitution of the nation. The royal house has 
reigned for more than twenty-five hundred years in an un- 
broken line, and during all this time no pretender or usurper 
has ever even attempted to dispute its sway. The imperial 
destiny with this remarkable continuity is closely bound up 
with ancestor worship. Twice, alien civilizations have been 
adopted, but Buddhism and Christianity alike had to accom- 
modate themselves to the spirit of the empire, while during 
the centuries of military shoguns the reverence for the im- 
perial house never changed. This helps us to understand 
why this rescript was more than a new article in a constitu- 
tion or than a charter or even a papal bull. It was almost a 



MORAL EDUCATION 2il 

sacred text, to be learned, preached on, because respect for the 
dynasty made such a promulgation from it regarded with a 
veneration little short of religious. In 1899, ^ clear up con- 
fusion and divergencies that were still unsettled, a committee 
was appointed to compile a moral text-book for all elementary 
schools, and in 1902 its work was finished. From a few of 
the chief points of this national system of moral education we 
may infer something as to its scope and power. ^ The adora- 
tion of the emperor gives to the system something not unlike 
a religious sanction, and yet it is entirely secular save so far 
as reverence to the emperor and ancestors, whose spirit is 
believed to be actually alive and active in their descendants, 
is religious. The present system, it must also be said, is made 
directly continuous with the old learning which a few cen- 
turies ago was kept alive chiefly in Buddhist temples and in 
the training of the Samurai, in military exercises, in hardship, 
obedience, perseverance, coolness, resourcefulness, managing 
affairs of home, etc., the latter training being not unlike that 
of an ideal English gentleman, and insisting chiefly on duties 
and but little on rights. Morals have always been deemed 
the chief end of education. For children from six to fourteen 
years of age, topics most necessary to the life of childhood 
with special reference to the degree of development, sex, etc., 
are those chiefly stressed. Theoretically, every child, what- 
ever its class, enters the public school, and a special permit 
is required to be educated in a private school or at home. 
First comes instruction in respect to elders, parents, frugality, 
industry, modesty, fidelity, and then duties toward the state 
and society, with special emphasis on chastity and modesty 
for girls. These virtues are taken up singly and illustrated 
by tales of good deeds, by proverbs, short pieces to be read, 
pictures, etc. On entering school, children are taught to ap- 
preciate and love it, made to understand they come to be good 
men and women, that it is a pleasant place; the teacher must 



^ See The Spirit of Japanese Education with Special Reference to Methods of 
Moral Instruction and Training in Different Grades of Schools, by Baron Kikuchi, 
on Moral Instruction and Training in Schools. Edited by M. E. Sadler. London, 
Longmans, Green, 1908, vol. 2, pp. 319-45. Supplemented by Dr. Yoshida, Notes 
on Methods of Moral Instruction in Japan. Ibid., pp. 346-49. See also J. A. 
B. Scherer, Young Japan. Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1905, 328 p. 



212 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

see to it that there is an air of warmth, kindness, and dignity. 
Pupils are drilled on rising, standing, walking, holding books, 
hanging clothes; are taken around the schoolroom and play- 
ground, taught all that they may and may not do, posture, 
order, punctuality, hard work, and play; duties to father, 
mother, brother, sister, home, the emperor, with proper hon- 
orifics; then lessons on the body, on liveliness, on manners, 
etiquette and deportment, which are minor morals, truth tell- 
ing, the negative duty of not quarreling, lying, concealing, 
disturbing others, ownership, duties to living things, not to 
hurt other people's feelings, duties to teachers, food, cleanli- 
ness, regularity, modes of speaking, keeping promises, notic- 
ing faults, care of things, things lost, the flag, valor. In the 
next year comes instruction about reverence for ancestors, 
the duty of diligence, self-help, learning, perseverance, posses- 
sion of mind, endurance, conscience, boastfulness, magnanim- 
ity, charity, kindness to servants, gratitude, envy, trust, 
public good, love of country, superstition, benevolence, mili- 
tary service, taxation, office holding and elections, observance 
of the laws, how to be a good Japanese, duties to society, self- 
respect, dignity, dress, labor, competition, wealth, credit, dis- 
cipline, independence, progress, duties of a subject, respect of 
office. Much emphasis is laid on graduation, memorial, festal 
days and programmes, and the emperor's birthday is cele- 
brated with special solemnities, including profound obeisance 
before his portrait, the reading of the rescript and its explana- 
tion. Suitable songs are prescribed. 

In the middle school for boys, covering five years, from 
twelve to seventeen, and the girls' high school, from twelve to 
sixteen, morals are still based upon the rescript and the various 
syllabi, texts, etc., with plenty of maxims, examples of good 
deeds, with reference especially to ordinary and family matters 
and daily conduct. There is little system. Such topics as the 
following are impressed : reasons for observing school rules, 
authorities of the school, duties of the pupil, hygiene of exer- 
cise, eating, drinking, cleanliness, clothing, tenacity of purpose, 
mutual help, friendship, value of time, order, politeness, rela- 
tions of brother and sister, sacrifice of self for the public good, 
responsibility, political and social virtues, duties of professions 
and various industries, the dangers of temptation. Later and 



MORAL EDUCATION 213 

still more systematically much the same things are taught ; for 
instance, the morality of health, intellect, feeling, will, obliga- 
tions to all classes of people, to society, the state, the emperor, 
international relations, progress, obligations to nature, control 
of passions, development of common sense, toleration, modes 
of cultivating relations betweeen ethical and natural laws, all 
with frequent general reviews. Examples of an extraordinary 
or violent character are carefully avoided, lest false applica- 
tions be made. Abstruse ethics is also tabooed for it is unde- 
sirable for children to know that there are differences of 
theory. All that a girl is taught is based on the supposition 
that she will marry and be a mother. Manners are always im- 
portant. If, says Kikuchi, we did not believe that an educa- 
tional system could mould the character of a nation, everything 
would have to be remodeled. We hold the state can be saved 
and that our victories have been won by moral education. By 
it we have saved ourselves and prevented the melting away of 
the great ethical principles that have come down from the past 
and which are one of the solid foundation stones of morals. 
The late war, the spirit of recent legislation, the, in some re- 
spects, ideal relations of the members of a family, are products 
of moral education. How they have conserved and awakened 
the moral conscience of the nation ! Two principles in general 
are followed in ethical text-books; first, to select an ideal 
character and study his whole life, and the other, to select a 
broad action of virtue, and cull illustrations of it from various 
sources. Story and precept must go together.^ 

France. — Ever since the French schools were secularized 
and religious teaching forbidden in them, fearing an increase 
of immorality and realizing an ominous void created by the re- 
form in the curriculum, the French, both by commissions and 
by private enterprise, have devised many courses of moral and 
civil instruction for each grade. These books, of which we 

^ Lafcadio Hearn gave seventy-two Japanese boys as a theme for a composition 
the topic, "What would you most like in the world?" Nine of them said, "To die 
for our sacred emperor." Perhaps self-assertion and self-denial at root do go 
together. (See also Bernard Bosanquet, Ladies and Gentlemen. Internat. Jour, 
of Ethics, 1900, vol. ID, pp. 317—329. See also his Psychology of the Moral Self. 
N. Y., Macmillan, 1904, 132 p. And Hilare Belloc's Moral Alphabet, 1899. See 
also I. O. Nitobe, Bushido, the Soul of Japan. Philadelphia, Leeds & Biddle, 
1900, 127 p.) 



214 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

have a collection, are composed of maxims, moral principles, 
stories of heroism, and dramatic acts of virtue, not only from 
literature and history, but from current life. Feeling that 
conscience was not a sufficient guide, patriotism and the noble 
sentiment of honor were appealed to, and there were prizes, 
medals, and public testimonials for children who did noble 
acts. The love and pride of country and the instincts of the 
gentleman and lady were made into what has been called a 
new secular religion. Germany, on the other hand, realizing 
the immense difficulty of finding religious courses in which 
Jews, Catholics, and Lutherans could agree, a difficulty which 
has several times been attacked by the various religious bodies 
in this country, who have found it even harder to agree upon a 
uniform method than have the denominational mission boards 
of heathen lands, still adheres to the religious basis. Every- 
where the methods of bringing public education under reli- 
gious influence are becoming harder, because it is difficult to 
nucleate a consensus. In teaching morality, there is a broader 
and better basis of endeavor. 

France has made the most heroic effort in the history of 
education to teach morals without the aid of religion. Espe- 
cially ever since the epoch-making law of 1882, which required 
all elementary schools to teach morals and civics, and that 
besides Sunday, one day a week be set apart for such religious 
instruction as parents wished to provide (although all this 
must be done outside the school buildings), the whole vast 
problem of the moralization of the rising generation, independ- 
ently of all ecclesiastical influences or religious sanctions, has 
been a point of cardinal interest for not only educators but for 
not a few statesmen, philosophers, and literary men, some of 
whom have made important new contributions. Few silent 
revolutions, we are told, have ever had greater significance. 
The movement proceeded " from the very depths of the 
national consciousness." In establishing the frontiers between 
school and church, which were very intricate, it was necessary 
to avoid the accusation of " godless schools," and so it was or- 
dained that duties to God as they are revealed in conscience 
and reason as well as to the state, parents, self, etc., be taught. 
Respect for the God idea must be inculcated, however, with 
severe neutrality to the claims of different confessions, and 



MORAL EDUCATION 215 

some of the most progressive leaders (Buisson, Steeg, Picaut) 
demanded that morals be taught in a rehgious spirit. They 
desired, says Harrold Johnson/ " to secularize religion and 
sanctify the secular." The movement was thus at first guided 
by the above triumvirate of Protestants of Huguenot lineage 
and sympathy. They held that " it is possible for a man, in- 
dependently of creeds and churches, to live a moral life with 
all the depth and strength and force of the religious senti- 
ment." They wished the consciences of the young to be " as 
open to religious as to secular thought." But these ideals could 
not be entirely realized in France. The French mind is 
severely logical and perhaps for that reason, in part at least, 
that country as a whole has missed the great pedagogic ad- 
vantage of passing through the Protestant stage. Instead of 
a graded genetic processional (e. g., high church, Anglican, 
Lutheran, Evangelical, Unitarian, pantheism, or some other 
attenuated mature or post-mature stage of religion as intel- 
lectually interpreted) the French have provided themselves no 
halting place between Rome and reason, no halfway station 
on such doctrines as bibliolatry, or the substitution of an in- 
fallible book for an infallible church, or on such doctrines as 
justification by faith alone; but the alternative has been Ca- 
tholicism or free thought, and the leaders have had to balance 
as best they could the dangers of priestly control on the one 
hand and of the recrudescence of anarchistic tendencies that 
made the French revolution on the other. Hence, various 
societies, such as the powerful League Frangaise felt con- 
strained to dispense with God and immortality as sanctions to 
duty. Now most teachers and most of the scores of little 
manuals rely for the ultimate appeal by which a good life is 

^ To whose admirable report on moral instruction and training in France, in 
Sadler's Moral Instruction and Training in Schools (London, Longmans, Green, 

1908, vol. 2, p. 1-50), I am much indebted here, as well as to the four papers that 
follow in that report and a dozen of those of the International Moral Education 
Congress in 1908, edited by Gustav Spiller. London, David Nutt. See also G. 
Spiller, Report on Moral Instruction and on Moral Training in the Schools of 
Austria, Belgium, the British Empire . . . the United States. London, Watts, 

1909, 362 p. With an admirable bibliography. See also Moral Training in the 
Public Schools, the California prize essays, by Charles E. Rugh and others. Boston, 
Ginn & Co., 1907, 203 p. See also many articles in the International Journal of 
Ethics. 



2i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

to be justified on ideals of the innate dignity or divinity of 
man, perhaps on Kant's categorical imperative (although that 
is now in one camp interpreted as an external authority), on 
social solidarity, or the philosophy of positivism, or utilita- 
rianism, or theories of conscience. Most of them would invoke 
deity or metaphysical concepts at least only as a last resort. 
Johnson well suggests that since the French have no Mikado 
whose edict could add potent external to intensive inner 
authority resting on the merits of the promulgation itself, 
there is now need of a declaration of the duties of man that 
shall have the same dominance as the " Declaration of Rights 
of Men " now exercises. 

By the law of 1882 one hundred thousand teachers, 
whether Catholics or Protestants, strangely ignorant of the 
Bible, most of them with little deep personal moral experience 
or individual conviction, were suddenly given a kind of lay 
priesthood. Far centuries the moral and religious appeal had 
been chiefly external and the national consciousness in these 
matters was singularly crude and naive. The traditions and 
very atmosphere were more or less skeptical about the very 
existence of fundamental religious or ethical principles. Hence, 
it was not surprising that the first report on the results of the 
new moral education in the lower schools, drawn up by Lich- 
tenberg in 1889, showed no very satisfactory results. It is 
thus unfortunate that it is from this report that a very general 
impression has gone forth that the scheme itself had been tried 
and found wanting. But it must be remembered that the legis- 
lation was itself not complete until 1886 and that several im- 
portant enactments needful to carry out the plan to de-eccle- 
siasticize the higher grades of education came still later, and 
only in 1902 was moral culture given in secondary schools. 
Indeed, it is a prodigious work for a nation to seek to regener- 
ate itself through its schools. Moreover, there were vast 
arrears through a long period of decline to be made up. 
French children and youth are still suffering acutely for past 
neglect. There had been a very great increase in juvenile 
crime after the Franco-Prussian War which showed little sign 
of being checked. As if by a malign or ironical fate, in 1880 
France had passed a law facilitating the production and sale 
of alcohol, and in sixteen vears its use had increased threefold 



MORAL EDUCATION 217 

(as against Norway, which by a vigorous legislation has re- 
duced it to about one third its former dimensions). The use 
of absinthe also increased about threefold in the nine years 
ending 1894. The French Government is dependent upon 
these sources for a part of its revenue. Native wines are very 
common in the school dinners provided at public cost and in 
those brought by the pupils. Again, art, literature, and even 
posters and postal cards that are not only suggestive, but some- 
times almost pornographic, abound to a unique extent even in 
rural districts. The activities represented by Anthony Com- 
stock and his societies have very little place in France. There 
the government fails to cooperate actively against either alco- 
hol or obscenity. 

Perhaps this is the place to mention, too, that like all great 
movements, this has had its fanatics and its crank literature. 
One master has evolved a very elaborate course of ten lessons 
on making the toilet in the morning, ten on table manners, ten 
on greetings, salutations, etc., through a long list. In one tale 
a cat, after destroying a nest of young birds, is overwhelmed 
with the pangs of remorse. There are photographs and mov- 
ing pictures of good children giving sous to beggars and of 
bad ones abusing them, etc., etc., and essays in the high schools 
on suicide. Children conjugate the verbs obey, respect, etc., 
for the moral effects of repeating these words and phrases. 
One writer would reform business by making morals promi- 
nent in our commercial and industrial schools. Another mem- 
ber urges rightly enough, but with almost unintelligible ab- 
stractness, that pedotechnie must rest on paidology and goes 
on to elaborately reason out this obvious commonplace. One 
writer gives a formula for educating to originality and initia- 
tive by a new method which involves repression of imitation. 
One sees hitherto undreamed of sources of moral edification in 
arithmetic if number and measure are taught as the absolute 
in the Pythagorean sense. A socialist thinks parents do not 
cooperate enough with the schools in training to virtue because 
they do not want their children to be more moral than they 
themselves are, nor that they should be made too honest to 
succeed in business under present conditions. Everywhere the 
social sanctions seem overemphasized, perhaps as an instinctive 
safeguard against anarchy. One writer avers that the sole 



2i8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

duty of parents is to make children and that the state must 
then take them and do the rest. Another says it is attempting 
the impossible to really hold any faith and at the same time 
to be tolerant toward other creeds, and hence it is well that 
teachers of morals usually have, in fact, an animus against 
religion, especially Catholicism. One condemns the exclusive- 
ness of university professors and would have them walk and 
talk with high-school pupils weekly. Another, in pleading for 
individual instruction, declares the present school system is 
as absurd as if patients in a hospital were grouped according 
to age and treated collectively in these groups. 

Nevertheless, this great movement is steadily developing 
and the efficacy of the system was never so great nor its prom- 
ise so bright as now. Democracy, of course, always demands 
universal suffrage and this necessitates universal education, 
and this again makes it imperative that moral teaching per- 
vade the masses with a spirit of reasonableness, justice, and 
fraternity. There are those who still urge that "the worship of 
duty is the worship of God " ; that His supreme revelation is 
in conscience ; that to believe in the good, the beautiful, and the 
true utterly is to believe in God, while others hold that to instill 
a horror of all that is vile and an ardor for all that is noble is 
a different, although no less august, function than that of the 
church. To draw out of the depths of man's inner nature all 
that is sufficient for his moral development with no adventi- 
tious or extraneous support from anything supernatural or 
authoritative, has been a more and more inspiring ideal, which 
enthusiasts have claimed to be the loftiest and most unique of 
all the efforts of the human race since the modern period of 
culture began. Here we have perhaps the very apex of mod- 
ernism, so that it is not surprising that the early moral lesson 
books were placed on the Index and those of Compayre were 
publicly burned. Still, the lay teaching of morals has become 
more impartial and has grown in public confidence and in 
favor with teachers, who find that it makes their vocation 
more influential and respected even in their own eyes. The 
destinies of the republic are felt to be more closely bound up 
with the schools, and this, despite the outcries of the clericals 
and the crudities and skepticism of the earlier years. Many 
of the French public teachers have not been friendly to religion 



MORAL EDUCATION 219 

and have found it hard not to diffuse a skeptical spirit. " The 
deity that presides over these moral lessons," says Johnson, 
" is essentially the goddess of reason." He continues in sub- 
stance that they instruct the intellect rather than appeal to the 
heart. Sentiment and feeling are too much ignored. Pep- 
tonized moral food is crammed. There is overmuch psitta- 
cism or parrot recitation, too much learning by heart, copying 
of maxims, mottoes hung- and written everywhere. It is some- 
times even " science sans conscience." 

These tendencies, which are more or less dominant in all 
grades and topics of French education, are just now worst in 
the moral training of adolescents. The pupils of the Lycee 
are precociously introduced to ethical theory and write theses 
that lack vital touch with life. The secondary teacher teaches 
remotely from the desk and does not come into close touch 
with the life of his pupils, who nevertheless are under inces- 
sant supervision every hour of the day and worked with by 
censors, repetiteurs and resiimeiirs. In most Lycees some 
special ethical theory or system which seems best to the teacher 
is stressed. Again, after the first two years, instruction in 
morals ceases, giving place to preparation for the baccalaure- 
ate, and so at just the stage where it is most needed and should 
be most effective it is not given at all. Compositions on moral 
topics are common, although prizes for them, it is said, are 
sometimes won by the worst boys. But if the Lycees are still 
rather exclusive and bourgeois and, like secondary institutions 
generally are most conservative, best protected from and latest 
to respond to new movements, the normal colleges at St. Cloud 
and especially at Fontenay, where Picaut has done his remark- 
able work in the moral education of those who are to be 
teachers of teachers in the scores of training schools for pri- 
mary instructors, are thoroughly democratic, and here moral 
instruction is better given and is more effective. Nevertheless, 
some three fourths of the children of France leave school 
before the legal age of thirteen and are so withdrawn from the 
influence of the moral training provided when they are ap- 
proaching the most critical years of life. Could moral educa- 
tion be continued to the period of army service, very much 
would be accomplished. Probably, when all is said, the efficacy 
of such a system really depends more on what is done after, 



220 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

rather than what is done before, twelve or thirteen. But al- 
though there are several kinds of continuation schools, courses, 
lectures for popular instruction, alumnial associations which 
provide teaching- (sometimes conduct employment bureaus), 
the foundations of morality laid in the elementary schools are 
not sufficiently built upon. 

Among the best lines of endeavor is the training of 
soldiers who are, of course, young men. This work is now 
well organized, with libraries and "lectures designed to make 
the two years of compulsory army service a real continu- 
ation school advancing both knowledge and morality. The 
morale of the army is coming to be felt to be very dependent 
upon and in need of such kind of training. The primary 
teachers now work with splendid incentives, and nearly all of 
them wish to rise and become inspectors. Otherwise these 
teachers are mostly untraveled and are prone to narrowness. 
But they know their field, and are in close, almost parental, 
relations to their flock. Such teachers, good and bad, have 
often been lately represented in French novels. Each such 
school has a kind of solidarity and every child is eager for the 
diploma or leaving certificate, which often hangs in the poorest 
homes. There is a weekly report for the parents to sign and 
comment on if they will, and this gives the teacher a better 
hold on the pupil. Graphic curves are often kept, showing at 
a glance the progress of each pupil for each month in his whole 
career. Corporal punishment is usually forbidden, cleanliness 
is made a prominent virtue. The poor are helped to books, 
clothes, and even toys. There is a comprehensive school-in- 
surance system, to which now nearly seven hundred thousand 
children belong; two sous a week are brought and this gives a 
sense of mutualism. In the flood of usually rather dull text- 
books on moral and civic instruction, J. Payot's " La Morale a 
r Ecole," 1905, stands out as the best; all is based on social 
solidarity. It is called " the most important moral discovery 
of the nineteenth century." It is genetic and shows the evolu- 
tionary history of man from savagery, and this gives a sense 
of solidarity with the past. Here, too, may be mentioned as 
typical, E. Petit's " Jean Lavenir," a boy's autobiography 
showing what moral instruction is at present. There is now 
great activity in the production of moral courses and a tend- 



MORAL EDUCATION 221 

ency away from the abstract to the concrete with perhaps 
excessive detail. 

But despite all carping and defects, France to-day presents 
the magnificent spectacle of a great nation attempting to re- 
generate itself morally, as Germany sought to do, intellectually 
and nationally, after the Battle of Jena a century ago, through 
the schools. This movement is giving to the school, which had 
none before and did not feel the lack of it, a genuine soul. 
There is a fresh educational consciousness which is becoming 
an ever larger factor in realizing the national ideals. To a 
psychologist of religion the whole movement is profoundly 
religious and its anti-clerical cast makes it all the more 
earnest. Altogether it is a new creation which will be 
studied with intense interest. It seems almost as if the 
Divine were making a new revelation of Himself to-day 
in this movement. It implies the sublimest faith in human 
nature as capable of saving a nation, even when some of 
its own patriots were ready to weep over it as Christ wept 
over Jerusalem. 

And yet, despite all this magnificent adult endeavor, a con- 
noisseur of child nature feels that its needs are not yet met and 
that its heart is still left hungry. The child cannot lead a 
moral life with all the fervor and strength of the religious 
sentiment without religion. There are solemn chords in the 
soul not struck by set lessons in morals, by new readers illus- 
trating the latest and best in current literature and painting, 
or by ideals of social collectivity and solidarity. There is little 
to appeal to the imagination. Fairy tales are generally 
severely tabooed. " Lights in the heaven of the soul have been 
put out." " There is no vent or escape into the ideal." All 
is too obvious or too often tainted with commonplace. If the 
good old morality of our fathers tends to " ankylose conscious- 
ness," the rationalistic flavor of the eighteenth century that 
clings to this teaching makes middle-school boys morally pre- 
cocious. Conscience matures late and slowly and the method 
and spirit of schools are very hard to change, so that it must 
take generations rather than decades to make the culture of 
conscience as central as that of memory now is. But the 
youthful soul has a common treasure and spiritual patrimony 
in the form of latent race experience that makes it cry out for 



222 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

breadth of life. For it indeed, " science does not exhaust the 
real nor conscience the ideal." Religion at its very lowest is 
the category of the ideal. It is the most intensely humanistic 
of all studies. Wise men, even those who reject it for them- 
selves, urge with great earnestness that it develops the youth- 
ful imagination as nothing else ever can begin to do. It has 
a unique sphere in the soul and must be taught by a pedagogy 
of its own. It should bring in a most stimulating and heroic 
atmosphere. The child's individualistic experience is too nar- 
row to afford of itself sufficient basis for moral education, al- 
though it must be both utilized and widened to the uttermost. 
Morals must be enforced by some sense of authority. It is 
not enough to merely reason with callow striplings, although 
French parents and teachers are more prone to rely chiefly on 
this. Moral science may be largely, but it cannot be wholly, 
experimental, at least for youth ; nor is the Kantian imperative 
or utilitarianism or any other theory adequate, and the history 
of moral systems brings perplexity and inclines to casuistry. 
If religion be yielding to the higher, more spiritual impulsions 
inherited from the past which prompt man to ever higher 
evolution, which perpetually inspire the inner counsels of per- 
fection and of superior human vocation, the transcendental 
motivation so strong in adolescence must be utilized and a 
sense of corporate unity with family, school, city, state, man- 
kind and the great cosmos, strengthen each other, while at the 
same time the duty of complete self-realization, of developing 
individuality to its uttermost must be impressed, and the con- 
sequent sense of dignity and self-respect — both these tenden- 
cies, the social and the individual — must be stimulated and 
given due temper by a sense of limitation and dependence 
which is religious in its very core — this is the ideal. To this 
end, the schoolboy or girl must not only get into touch with, 
and if possible visit every local charity, become acquainted 
with every reform and welfare endeavor and organization in 
his own environment, but must also profit by every source of 
personal moral and religious enthusiasm to which he is capable 
of responding. 

Views of Other Writers. — For years I have read and kept 
tab by notes, now growing very bulky, on many score of 
books and articles on moral education, the rereading of which 



MORAL EDUCATION 223 

now brings a confusion that will not be resolved because of the 
vast variety of standpoints and the great diversity of emphasis 
laid upon every aspect of this vast problem. 

F. A. Manny cannot agree with Professor Palmer's opposition to 
definite moral instruction when he says that morality does not take 
its rise in knowledge. Moral education should begin, Palmer says, 
when one duty conflicts with another, and only so much teaching is 
necessary as will give the child respect for institutions and adjust- 
ment. Adler lays great stress on protected environment, the truth 
asserted by a superior mind that has traveled the same ground, 
dogmatic assertion preceding verification. He would have it include 
ability to change with the environment, and to train reformers. 
Griggs thinks the object of moral training is to substitute inte- 
grating apportioning of desire or the extension of sympathy and 
personality over widening areas of life. Dewey would develop mem- 
bership of the individual in a larger whole, the person having not 
only power to change but to shape things. Griggs gives over five 
hundred titles on this subject. Manny praises studies of govern- 
ment. Colin Scott praises group work. B. Cronson (Pupil Self- 
Government, N. Y., Macmillan, 1907, 107 p.) finds the true value of 
the child not in his childhood but in his latent manhood. Gulick 
pleads for efficiency. Larned illustrates the great value of simplicity 
and directness, with citations from men and works. Cramer wants 
alternative courses of action kept open while adaptations are being 
made. This makes moral thinkers, and correlates responsibility with 
freedom. He also discusses schoolboy honor and the fraternity sys- 
tem. A prize was given to a Philadelphia clergyman who urges that 
right means according to the will of God, etc. 

B. E. Brereton well expresses the French attitude in urging that 
the moment children begin to reflect, as they do at an early age, 
they want to know the reasons of conduct. Usually now, nurses 
and parents stifle free inquiry by authority and thus stunt the legiti- 
mate element of curiosity. The schools dampen these heart search- 
ings until the boy is in great danger of losing his healthy sense of 
wonder. Normally, he asks what life means, and what is its pur- 
pose that he must have standards, and that there may be some- 
thing to live for. Thus, there must be thinking of a kind. We have 
not hitherto given children the credit for being able to do that 
which they can and long to do. Descartes thought that ideas be- 
come irresistible in proportion to their clearness. The Revolution, 
too, has helped to give France a problem which she must work out 
for herself, and neither she nor England can set fashions for the 
other. Again, we should not speak of the moral question, but of 
a series of moral questions. Paul Gaultier holds that without re- 
ligion we could never have a veritable altruism; and yet, as M. A. 
Croisset declares in his " La Crise Morale," there are not symp- 



224 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

toms or even a possibility of a return of the old traditional religion. 
But as Sorel says, the two equations, science and religion, are utterly 
irreducible, and those who read one out of the other are illogical. 
We must extract now the spirit of Christianity and disregard the 
latter. Science and religion must be given each its own independent 
place. Both must be cultivated and due balance maintained between 
them. Gaultier does not make morals a positive, autonomous and 
independent science quite apart from metaphysics and religion, but 
on the contrary, only insists that morality must be natural before 
it is made supernatural. Tufts thinks there should be general cor- 
relation between school training and that by which society is ad- 
vanced. In early years indirect agencies may be relied upon. But 
the subject mattter is not properly organized, especially in civics, 
history, and literature. The school lays too much stress on the in- 
tellect. De Garmo urges that moral ideas must be transformed into 
ideals. Man must be taught to supplement the altruism of service 
by the altruism of sight. The mother must be taught to fight dirt 
and disease for her children. W. S. Hall thinks that socially school 
hygiene can be made very much of in this regard. Making a living 
has moral possibilities that are not utilized to their full extent at 
present. Cooperative effort seems to be more appreciated just now 
than perfecting oneself, or even the sacrifice of altruism, and 
some stress is laid upon rapidity and perfection of workmanship. 
H. Johnson believes that mere morality would be cold, intellectual, 
and would not stir the instincts of wonder and reverence. Moral 
education ought to include among its tasks that of cultivating a 
higher religious attitude. A stupid man cannot be really virtuous, 
and it is rather doubtful whether a purely intellectual being could 
be so. It is not merely fulfilling our functions as a member of a 
social whole; it includes self-realization, some standards of rev- 
erence, ideas of comparative values. Foerster thinks that ethical 
education should make men independent of the impulsions and ex- 
citations of the moment. Voyst said not only the school should teach 
moral practice, but the parents should know the faults of their chil- 
dren better and influence them more in their habits, food, dress, etc. 
Avebury thought moral education in England was uninteresting, 
narrow, appealed too much to the memory, and had little influence 
on character; said teaching should be indirect. Direct teaching 
must never be before ten, said Hoffmann, but should be very con- 
crete, and the illustrations taken from the life of the child. Cer- 
tain branches of instruction have more moral value than others, and 
Sedgwick emphasizes literature; Schneller, history; Rowe, manual 
training; Weysse, study of nature; Ravenhill, science; Lombroso 
advocated hypnotic suggestion in some cases, but the London Con- 
gress thought the time had not yet come for this. The sentiment 
was rather against a comprehensive system of rewards and punish- 
ments, and some condemn them all. 

Clifford W. Barnes deprecates the principle that the school is to 



MORAL EDUCATION 225 

make every pupil an effective economic unit and insists that the 
goal is the development of character and right conduct. It is no 
longer enough to teach the three R's, and the fact that we receive 
every year more than a million foreigners, many of them of the 
poorest and least educated class, magnifies the problem of moral 
education. It is not enough to teach obedience, punctuality, good 
manners, and school rules, nor to give intellectual instruction in 
rights and duties. In the case of exceptionally bad children the 
teacher may appeal to the class to know if they have done all they 
can to help him. This may even come in lieu or as a prelude of 
expulsion, or pupils may be made to feel responsible for teaching 
laggards who are liable to be dropped. We are now studying art, 
domestic science, manual training, hygiene, and every school branch, 
to see what moral value can be got out of it. In Europe both 
moral and religious instruction are most fearlessly taught. In Great 
Britain the first school hour is devoted to religious lessons, and 
many report the subject the most interesting one of the curriculum. 
This is a field where we must simply address ourselves courageously 
to problems that are so stupendous as to seem almost impossible. The 
new international organization to investigate and promote this work 
is the most hopeful thing in the field at present. 

Alice H. Putnam thinks that the child can be disposed to much 
that is good by beginning very early to repress the individual in 
the interests of the social whole. The child is never out of the 
domain of morals and ethics. There must be close union between 
hearing, knowing, and doing, even in the interests of attention. 
Children must not be left so free to work out their own ideas that 
they cannot be subordinated. Only toward adolescence should habit 
be cultivated in James's sense of moral gymnastics, save on the 
daily stents of cleanliness, order, and other little duties. Reverence 
and respect is a prime basis of virtue, and the best guarantee of 
growth. Example never fails. 

C. L. Payton says that sensibility is a word that should not lose 
caste. There must be greater freedom and sympathy between a teacher 
and pupil, which knowledge of the latter by the former greatly aids. 
The child's feelings are very changeable, often irrational, and their 
desires quickly cease, for they have little tenacity, and new inter- 
ests always expel old ones. Monotony is so painful that even slight 
changes are often welcome. One of the strongest instincts of chil- 
dren is for activity. Hence comes much of their mischievousness, 
for they are always itching and bursting into life. Acquisitiveness, 
too, is strongly marked. The comparative and emulative tendency 
needs legitimate scope. Sociability is almost a passion. One of the 
keenest and most difficult feelings to use is the love of praise. 
Some are very easily discouraged; others are spoiled by indiscrim- 
inate commendation. The idolatry of mothers is always dangerous. 
Spencer says, " The test of being educated is : Can you do what 
you ought when you ought, and whether you want to do it or not ? " 
16 



226 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

E. B. Bryan says in substance that many things immoral for 
adults have no moral significance in the child, that such standards 
as he develops come to him more by unconscious imitation and sug- 
gestion than by precept. It is not always theft for a child to appro- 
priate virhat does not belong to him; neither is he a liar if he yields 
sometimes to his imagination, a trickster because he connives in 
many ways to attain his end, or immodest because indicating no 
shame. The time will come when all these things will have moral 
significance, and the pedagogic question is what can be done at 
the right time, without making the child hyperconscious of being 
either very good or very bad. Nowhere so much as in morals and 
in conduct do suggestion and imitation play such a role. Thus, 
chiefly, he learns language and no example of our conduct and truth- 
fulness is lost upon him. 

H. M. Thompson says that perhaps there is no point on which 
there is more agreement than that children, when they leave school, 
should be equipped to meet the moral requirements of life, and that 
instruction is not enough, and also that denominational religions 
and even theological conceptions are mainly inefifective and some- 
times defeat the ends of virtue. Payot, a French inspector, in 
1902 directed the removal from the walls of the schools of all pic- 
tures representing scenes of violence and ferocity. It is not enough 
to inculcate virtue as occasions arise, but something more systematic 
is needed. Codes of honor may be made very effective. The author 
outlines, although it must be admitted in a very general way, sug- 
gestions for three stages of moral instruction. He commends Char- 
lotte Yonge's " Book of Golden Deeds " for the first, although he 
recommends that each teacher compile his own Book of Golden 
Deeds. He would have special attention given to teaching sympa- 
thy, mutual dependence, self-respect, respect for others, kindness to 
animals, and suggests vEsop and such stories as the " Bundle of 
Sticks," " Sir Philip Sidney," etc. He also suggests stories of the 
type of " Grace Darling " and " Father Damien." In the third stage 
instruction must be more complex. Here he protests most emphat- 
ically against basing ethics upon Scripture. The propensity of the 
theologists has always been to place the most incomprehensible doc- 
trines in the forefront. The child is taught to submit himself to 
spiritual gods. F. J. Gould's work in persuading his countrymen 
to adopt more nontheological instruction in the schools is highly 
praised. The difficulties in this field in general are very great, but 
it is cowardice to say that because morality is of such great impor- 
tance it cannot be taught. We must grapple with it in dead earnest. 

Buisson says history shows in large type what we must decipher 
in very delicate lines in the psychology of the individual, though 
the will cannot be educated by itself according to Kant's " I ought, 
therefore I can," and it is also difficult to eliminate all the heterono- 
mous elements from Schopenhauer's " will to live." Pure will needs 
the aid of all kinds of auxiliaries, especially in the young. Perhaps 



MORAL EDUCATION 227 

will begins in the lower forms of life in irritability. The feeling 
of effort vanishes when habits are acquired and we are prone to 
grow listless and to abandon struggle. Strong wills are perhaps 
legitimate offspring of great clearness of understanding. Will both 
impels and vetoes or inhibits, so that the Stoic precepts, sustine and 
abstine, comprise its work. First comes spontaneous activity or the 
instinctive movements ; next, conscious reflection ; and then habitual 
activity, which is a synthesis of the two. How much effort are 
we capable of is a test question. Duty increases as we advance 
and does not diminish. We can never close accounts with con- 
science. The will ought to serve all noble causes. The will has 
many forms, directions, and stages. Self-control is one of the high- 
est. It involves mastery, coordination, and subordination. Some say 
that when halting between two courses we must always choose the 
hardest. Reason, duty, truth, justice, are four expressions of will. 
We must accept the mighty burden of liberty or be eternal minors. 

G. W. A. Luckey says the United States spend nearly two hun- 
dred million dollars annually upon public schools. Does it make the 
young better? It would seem that character is less fixed, but our 
age and ideals have changed. Instead of allegiance to higher pow- 
ers, free men owe success or failure to their own acts. Character 
means the harmonious development of all the povvers. Will evolves 
from involuntary aimless movements, then is guided by perceptions, 
until there is a desire to reproduce pleasurable and avoid painful 
states. Voluntary always depend upon former involuntary move- 
ments. Hence, surrounding conditions must be right. Health, in- 
tellect, sensibility, sympathy, are all needed. Life is transition. 
Other types will be necessary. 

G. Spiller, in discussing the Moral Education Congress, con- 
trasts the general conditions of life a hundred years ago, when most 
people lived in villages and were interested in local and rural affairs, 
with the present, when life is on an international plane. Add to 
this the progress of science, the new and larger ideas of religion 
which have made the old orthodoxy obsolete, the new human soli- 
darity, change of modes of treating crime, etc., and we realize that 
not only the physical and intellectual, but also the moral situation 
has undergone a radical transformation. Responsibility for the 
education of children has been almost entirely taken over by the 
nation. Even the church is more or less superseded in this field. 
Thus, in a sense, there are two codes of ethics, one supplied by the 
nation and the other by the churches. More and more it is under- 
stood that intellectual education is no substitute or even guarantee 
for moral training, and that the state must control the latter as well 
as the former. The ethical concepts and motives that rule the 
world must rule the school in order to fit men and women to live 
in the large present and the yet larger future. Thus, " every lesson 
in the curriculum should be primarily an ethical lesson." There can 
be no doubt that church teaching is to vanish from the schools of 



228 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the world, and that practical training in conduct of some kind is 
to take its place. Deny it though some do, there is some difference 
between theological and civic or social ethics. 

Sir E. Buske thinks there is great progress being made in this 
field at present. He thinks the power of moral judgment needs cul- 
tivating, and its scale must be extended upward indefinitely. Higher 
and higher acts and motives must be known. And tolerance must 
be taught for those mostly on a low moral plane. T. S. Morton 
points out the dangers of too much authority and too dominant per- 
sonalities, even though they be wholesome. A feeble, quiet man 
may teach and guide a class by his intellect, and he may do it with- 
out appeal to higher authority. Perhaps this would best illustrate 
the French system, which is not made for export. J. Baumann has 
surveyed the general history of the development of the will, its 
plasticity, its laws, its relations to morals and character, the patho- 
logical side of the subject, and makes all center here. J. S. Mc- 
Kenzie says that we should produce the good citizen even before 
the good man, for the latter is involved in the former. There is 
an overlapping margin in diverging moral ideas, which we should 
attend to, for it often makes trouble, but our chief subject should 
bring out underlying unity. Although there are difficulties, they are 
inherently different from those in other educational topics, and we 
should hail these very difficulties with delight. Teachers do need 
special training unquestionably, but who will tell how to give them 
just this training? A recent writer calls attention to the frequency 
of drawings of the lowest and most savage and most inartistic style 
that are essentially obscene, to which children are now exposed, and 
would have energetic measures taken to prevent and to remove them. 
He even holds that the liberty of art in this respect should be re- 
stricted in the interests of childhood. He deplores the cynicism that 
sometimes appears even in decorations. 

Claraz, deploring that we only learn how to live when life is 
almost past, urges that the study of the earlier life of criminals 
shows that in the great number of cases their moral perversion 
originated in the very earliest stages of adolescence. Society owes 
education to children as its most sacred obligation, just as it owes 
justice to adults. We should wake up about this obligation to aban- 
doned children, and we need a very little moral regeneration merely 
as a matter of public safety. Punishment ought to excite regret, 
but this cannot be awakened in those who have no sense of right 
and wrong and of all social laws. One fifth of all court cases are 
orphans, and half are without father and about a quarter without 
a mother. Precocious perversity is very common, and prostitution 
in some form almost universal in this class. A. Meiklejohn says 
that the college is not fitted to teach the forms of living or practice 
the art of doing so, but to broaden and deepen interest into love, to 
bind up the riches of human experience and knowledge. It is not 
merely to prepare specifically to succeed in life, nor solely for effi- 



MORAL EDUCATION 229 

ciency, nor social service, valuable as these ends are. It should (a) 
teach the young how to use their leisure or play; (b) develop friend- 
ship; (c) give taste for w^ork. How few are acquiring in college 
interest in the things that are most worth while ! The art of life 
is a great art. Findlay, Paton, Golling, K. Koch, R. Deutsch, Kalb, 
Siebert, Trandorf, Wiget, Ronsch, Compayre, Harris, and indeed, 
nearly all the best writers upon educational subjects, have grappled 
with some phase of this mighty theme and shed light upon some 
part of it or contributed something to show its wider ranges and 
its all-transcending importance. 

There is surely a moral revival that is felt not only in colleges 
and universities, but is connected with the Hague movement, the 
many altruistic organizations for defectives, dependents, delinquents, 
that underlies Hampton, Tuskegee, the George Junior Republic, the 
Juvenile Court, and all these efforts endeavoring to save society 
by impregnating it with higher ideals of moral life. The men in 
whom the country is deeply interested are ethical teachers, like 
Hughes and Roosevelt. The enthusiasm they inspire is largely 
moral, and there is great indication that this moral revival will con- 
tinue till the great work has been completed. Pfordten thinks the 
pedagogue's basal precept should be to remain true to the deeper 
currents which have already set in and which dominate conscious- 
ness. This is being true to one's self, which takes precedence over 
reproducing the external world. If there are fundamental defects of 
character, people must conform to ideals of virtue even if they have 
to act or play a part at first, for that is what consciousness is for. 
Friedrich gives an interesting series of articles on the development 
of the moral and ethical judgment in the drama which is full of 
interesting pedagogic suggestions. 

Challamel has written a volume of practical morality and current 
reading, and is one of the best representatives of the course in 
France, the twentieth anniversary of which has just been celebrated. 
The first general topic is the child in the family. The special sec- 
tions are, the family in ancient times and now, filial love, recogni- 
tion, the duty of respect, obedience, duties to grandparents, brothers 
and sisters, spirit of family tmity, duty of masters and servants. 
Each topic is explained and has a recitation, often poetic, with a 
few maxims, extracts, on which there are questions and matter to 
be remembered. The second part, on the child in the school, sets 
forth the need of learning and the dangers of ignorance, diligence, 
exactness, duties to teachers, comrades, necessity of good example, 
emulation, pride, envy, jealousy, duties on leaving the school. Under 
country, there are lessons on society and its benefits, the greatness 
of France and national pride, love and devotion to the country, 
respect and obedience to its laws, duty of paying taxes, rendering 
military service, loyalty to the flag, duty of voting. Individual 
duties are to the body as the instrument of the soul, hygiene, exer- 
cise, dress, temperance, the nature of the soul and the intellect, lying 



230 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and truthfulness, will power and courage, patience, resignation, per- 
severance, originality, anger, pride, vanity, work, economy, avarice, 
order, prodigality, duties to animals. Under social duties come 
justice, charity, duty to our neighbors, war, respect for the lib- 
erty of others and their possessions, respect for the honor of others, 
calumny, mendacity, gossip, respect for the opinions of others and 
tolerance also for their rights. Here, too, come charity, benevolence, 
good will, generosity, clemency, devotion, fraternity, solidarity, 
amity; and lastly come religious duties, the belief in God's exist- 
ence, eternity, religious culture in the form of hymns, etc. To love 
good is to love God, the honest man, examination of conscience. 
Supplementary lessons are upon politeness, conventionality, conver- 
sation, ceremonies, marriage, subscription, travel, etc. 

F. J. Gould has a series of three volumes of about two hundred 
pages each. The first is devoted to self-control and truthfulness, 
treating under the first head temperance, talking, patience, perse- 
verance, excelsior, courage, self-reliance, prudence, order, and mod- 
esty; under the second head, truth in act and speech, keeping prom- 
ises, careful eyes, ears, and tongues, knowledge, truth seeking, 
mastery, judgment, differences of opinion, proofs and tests, being 
and not seeming, and the reward. The second volume deals with 
kindness, work, and duty. Under the first head there are sections 
on the mother, the father, sisters, brothers, other people, kindness, 
clever people, the deaf, dumb, and blind, hospitals, lighthouses, fire 
brigades, animals; and under work and duty are chapters entitled, 
"Can," "Work," "Honor," "Duty," "Ability," "Social Service," 
" A Day in a Quarry." The third volume is devoted to the family, 
with chapters each on the Roman, Arab, Chinese, Spanish, Burmese, 
African family, the people of many other lands, the middle ages, 
fire, primitive man, what women have done, homes, furniture, beau- 
tiful things, the story of art, the Grail, science, Newton, customs, 
looking backward, Buddhists, the rehgion of India. Then there are 
stories of Confucius, Mohammed, Christian and Moor, Egypt, Assy- 
rian, Babylonian, Romans, Greeks, Parsees, etc. These volumes are 
much less systematic and less calculated to be pedagogically impres- 
sive than are the French books devoted to the same aim. They are, 
however, on the whole, better than the Sheldon series. 

I. Kooistra ''■ wrote in Dutch a concise treatise on moral education 
which reached its third edition when it was translated into German 
by E. Mueller. It is exceedingly comprehensive and practical. It 
first considers the subject from the personality of the teacher, who 
must have health, poise, firmness, equanimity, justice, and happi- 
ness. From the standpoint of the home and school he considers 
how they must work together, the present unsatisfactory relations, 
their cause and cure, the advantages of mutual visitations and 
school evenings, and the physician as a link between the home and 

* Sittliche Erziehung. Leipzig, Wunderlich, 1899, 100 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 231 

school. Under working order he considers the best conditions for 
will, how a child can be helped, the feeling of responsibility, gardens, 
and pedagogical evenings, good customs, order, courtesy, systems 
of advancement of each. Under poetry in child life he treats of 
happiness as a means of education, the gifts that lead to it and its 
conditions ; the interests of teachers and brothers, sisters and rela- 
tives; household order; prizing the good of others; care for serv- 
ants; class spirit; the child's relation to nature; the culture of 
gratitude; should the child feel this sentiment toward its parents; 
disillusions; selecting a happy humor; children who are quick-tem- 
pered or spoiled ; the right to be buoyant and happy ; child visits 
to theater, concert, balls; the necessity of preserving the childlike 
in the child; birthdays; charity; St. Nicholas and stork question. 
In treating the school as a servant of moral education, he describes 
the tedious and the good teacher; class instruction; rivalry; place 
taking and sense of one's own worth and of the value of knowl- 
edge ; the fact of education and thought. Under suggestion he 
treats of what the teacher can do by his own external appearance 
and what he does by example ; what he says ; how far it is well 
and when to invade the natural freedom of the child; kind of talk- 
ing about good and bad ; dress ; how children are bound to be what 
we think them to be; the indifferent child; falling under suspicion; 
command and prohibition; the passionate child; requests; how to 
make good seem tedious or attractive ; modesty ; a lapse into old, 
bad ways ; how children have a good memory for good deeds ; he 
would hinder the bad by supervision and discuss his temptation; 
promises; keeping of secrets; friendships; the pedagogical errors of 
dispersing, threatening, punishing, and rewarding. Under penalties 
he treats of judicial and pedagogic punishment and describes when 
the latter should be applied, when it does most good and is a nat- 
ural penalty, and whether there should be punishment for careless- 
ness. He thinks it should not be inflicted immediately ; should not be 
too strict in instruction; describes when he would send from the 
class ; how he would treat impudence ; face making ; how he would 
prepare the child for punishment ; when he would place him in the 
corner; when it should be physical; discusses the dark room; calling 
before the class; the considerations afterwards; the value and place 
of regret and resolution ; punishing several together. Under honor 
he treats of love of truth; lies of necessity; failures in lessons and 
excuses ; the discussion of falsehoods ; lies from fear ; how mistrust 
is a penalty; how to treat theft; and finally, in the education of 
girls, he discusses the difference between the sexes ; the girls' weak- 
ness or strength of body and mind; traditional ideals; immodesty 
and diffidence; politics; the desire to draw attention to herself; self- 
renunciation and sacrifice; the aim of life; and the training for 
wifehood and motherhood. 

Mr. M. Fairchild, of Baltimore, shows two or three score of stere- 
opticon pictures per lecture of actual scenes he has photographed 



232 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

as he could catch them from boy life, illustrating moral principles in 
action. During ten years he has gathered data for three or four 
lectures and hopes to have a dozen or so, and also that the work 
may be carried on later by others. This method is concrete and 
specific and is highly commended by teachers, parents, and boys who 
have seen it. It deals largely with school life and the lectures are 
intended primarily for schools. The idea is to show ethical princi- 
ples in action. This suggests whether the moving pictures might not 
be more effectively used here. Typical dramas of boy and girl life 
might be carefully rehearsed and then acted out before the camera; 
and thus, it would seem, they might be made more animated, typical, 
and effective. The possibilities of moral education in the innumer- 
able nickleodeon shows mainly supported by children and young peo- 
ple are incalculable.^ 

The Brownlee System of Toledo, Ohio, for moral education as- 
sumes that thoughts are things, that the mind like the body needs 
food, and so the thought power is put to work somewhat as follows : 
a word is chosen, one for each month : kindness, cleanliness, obedi- 
ence, self-control, courtesy, and cheerfulness, work, honor, honesty, 
clean language, manners. The topics may be subdivided, giving a 
week each. The word is beautifully lettered large on the blackboard 
as well as on a banner at the entrance. Maxims illustrating it are 
memorized ; their ideas are brought out. And then, having sensed 
their thought power, they are organized in a school city, each grade 
a ward, but only the fifth to the eighth eligible to office. The mayor 
must be from the graduating class and offices are held for five 
months. The maxim of the nominating convention is : " Say all 
the good you can of your own candidate and not a word against 
the opponent." Once a month there are citizens' meetings. The 
insistence upon the word seems suggested by certain mind curists 
who hang up words like " Health," " There is no disease," and 
fixate it as the people of Israel did the brazen serpent of Moses and 
became well. 

In the volumes of the Revue de VHypnotisme, now approaching 
its twenty-fifth year, are many cases of boys and girls reported to 
have been cured of truancy, lying, masturbation, and various other 
juvenile faults by being hypnotized, and when in that state given 
authoritative commands or moral sermonettes by way of suggesting 
to them to cease the indulgence of the evil propensity in question. 
This being done while they are still in the hypnotic state, they are 
taken to a neighboring room to sleep awhile under the influence 
of the injunction to betterment. They sometimes come repeatedly 
at stated intervals, and in many cases are reported cured or im- 
proved. I have seen the process and been assured by Dr. Berillon 
that the method is very effective. His institution, however, is not 

*See Walter H. Page, Teaching Morals by Photographs. World's Work,. 
March, 19 lo, pp. I27i5-i2 72'5. 



MORAL EDUCATION 233 

connected with the school system or the city government, but is 
frequently resorted to by anxious parents with wayward children. 
I know of no such systematic application of this method of moral 
orthopedics elsewhere, and there is much skepticism as to the effi- 
ciency claimed for it. Yet, that the far more subtle and laborious 
method of psycho-analysis, which- the Freud school apply, not in the 
hypnogogic or hypnoid, but merely in the tranquil state, has often 
caused great moral improvement, seems undoubted, especially in 
those with neurotic traits. Possibly there may develop in this field 
in the future some effective aid to virtue. 

A. von Overbeck ^ has developed with great clearness and fullness 
the present necessity of expanding all preventive functions for youth 
who are exposed to crime, and thinks that to treat the subject ade- 
quately requires a revision of the entire social structure. He almost 
seems to abolish the distinction between those who attempt and those 
who accomplish crime, and would have both punished alike, if not, 
indeed, participants and accessories. Criminal law, he regards, both 
in its provision and in its execution, as an inexpressibly clumsy 
instrument which does immense harm. 

H. S. Gray ^ brings sanity into this field, showing that while ciga- 
rettes are perhaps the least harmful form of tobacco in themselves, 
in another sense they are the most harmful. Some think boys that 
smoke cigarettes are like wormy apples that fall from the tree before 
they are ripe. They may indulge in the habit to a great excess until 
it becomes a dope. Perhaps it leads to other forms of narcotics, 
but it is singular that so little is really known scientifically upon 
the subject. We have, of course, statistics showing that very few 
high-grade pupils smoke, that it is bad for athletes and often goes, 
whether as cause or effect is uncertain, with mental and moral 
defect. 

G. H. Palmer ^ does not believe in special moral education in 
schools, but thinks that the school itself and its studies should be an 
ethical instrument, not only a place of learning but a social whole. 
Although himself an eminent academic authority on theoretical ethics, 
he gives no sign of acquaintance with any other of the many prob- 
lems of the pedagogy of ethics now under discussion. The only 
new thought in this exquisitely phrased monograph is a plea for a 
noble kind of imitation and influence. Personal influence is not 
increased by intimacy but rather '" familiarity breeds contempt." 
The young, brought into close association with their elders, are 
prone to fix on petty points and especially errors and miss the larger 
lines of character. Hence, " distance is a help in inducing enchant- 

' Die Erscheinungsformen des Verbrechens im Lichte der modernen Strafrechts- 
schule. Leipzig, Engelmann, 1909, 60 p. 

2 The Boy and the Cigarette Habit. Education, Jan., 1909, vol. 29, pp. 294-315. 

3 Ethical and Moral Instruction in Schools. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 
1909, 56 p. 



234 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ment, and nothing is so destructive of high influence as a slap-on- 
the-back acquaintance. One who is to help us much must be above us. 
A teacher should carefully respect his own dignity," etc. We must 
not cheapen ourselves, and an occasional weighty word is better than 
frequent talks. The teacher ought to be the sort of person the 
pupil would like to be. We should accept our pupils' admiration 
and deserve it. If they long above all things to be the kind of per- 
son we are, we are having the right influence upon them; and if 
pupils are supplied with teachers who, without swerving from their 
proper aim of imparting knowledge, will supply them with intellec- 
tual, social, and personal righteousness, nothing more is needed. 

Josiah Royce ^ conceives duty in terms of loyalty which, properly 
defined, he thinks to constitiTte the whole moral law and to be the 
cause of all virtues. His loyalty, however, is to causes and ideas 
rather than to persons, so that he does scant justice to the potency 
of fealty to leaders and heroes. Everything culminates in " loyalty 
to loyalty." Each must as his supreme task interpret and define 
the eternal in his life. This devotion to a carefully chosen and 
super-provincial cause potentializes life. " I could not love thee, 
dear, so much, loved I not ' virtue ' more." Its motivation is thus 
anti- or rather super-pragmatic. Hence, valuable as this volume 
is as a somewhat popular statement of the author's philosophy, it 
contains little that is of great psychological value, and hardly a refer- 
ence to the passion of loyalty in childhood to persons. 

This must suffice to illustrate the welter of opinion upon 
the subject, the diversity of viewpoints, the differences of 
stress, and our remoteness from any general consensus, and 
especially the illimitable vastness of this field. Meanwhile, 
many writers have attempted to give their theories concrete 
form in moral text-books for the young. In these there is 
more agreement, and they are a great advance upon the moral 
pabulum prepared for children in the be-good literature of a 
generation ago, vastly more definite and less sentimental, 
while the hortatory element has faded and left hardly a trace. 
They differ, too, almost toto coelo from the academic text- 
books in moral science which are mostly theoretical and specu- 
lative, discussing such abstract problems as freedom of the will, 
the nature of oughtness, the sanctions of goodness, etc. Of 
remorse or even regret for errors, we nowadays hear very 
little, and the bad boy rarely meets prompt and condign pun- 
ishment, as in the older literature. There is vastly less about 

* Philosophy of Loyalty. N. Y., Macmillan, 1908, 409 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 235 

sins or even faults, and chief emphasis is put upon positive 
good conduct, as if the effort was to protect the young from all 
knowledge of what is bad. 

Need and Status. — Is the need for moral education really 
as great as many frantic writers and declaimers represent? 
The percentage of juvenile crime is increasing in most civilized 
communities and the average age of first commitments is de- 
clining\ But city life makes many acts, particularly petty theft, 
criminal which in the country are only larks. What vital 
country boy has not stolen or would not have sometime, per- 
haps many times, been arrested if a policeman had caught him 
at all the worst things he ever did ? Who has not lied, broken 
the Sabbath, used bad language, done obscene acts? What a 
large proportion of the legion of faults, for which Kozle 
enumerates some nine hundred German words for use in scold- 
ing, which parents and teachers condemn, are really only 
offenses against their convenience and not due to real deprav- 
ity, such as noisiness, manifestations of animal spirits and 
disobedience of commands which a larger wisdom would never 
have imposed. Waywardness may be only the first outcrop 
of a strong will. The scores of gangs in every large city, 
despite their evils, do not very often become criminally lawless 
though their spirit may be so. The fact is, most adult stand- 
ards of virtue for children are often so unnatural as to be 
impossible. Again, exceptional children very often experience 
the tragedy of being misunderstood when the applications of 
the very first principles of child study would have saved them. 
With the herding of children in platoons and the lockstep 
methods of schools, with the decay of the parental instinct, 
the native-born American has lost touch with childhood as 
never in the history of the world, so that children were never 
quite so orphaned as here. Everywhere children tend to be 
blamed about inversely as their nature and needs are known, 
and where they go wrong in tender years, are they not more 
often sinned against than sinning? Alas! we have no national 
Pittsburg Survey, no adequate statistics or no psycho-analyses 
that go to the heart of the matter and give us the clear, cold, 
indubitable answers to these queries. Scientific data concern- 
ing even sex aberrations, the worst of moral dangers which 
children are exposed to, are not sufficiently extensive or ade- 



236 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

quate. Where proper vents, long circuits and alteratives are 
supplied for the animal propensities, it is amazing to see how 
even viciousness rights itself. Violations of adult prohibitions 
under existing conditions are no test of the innate moral nature 
of the young, who need not so much moral instruction as op- 
portunity, not so much precept as incentive and example, and it 
is parents and teachers that first need reformation. It is our 
moral codes and ideals for the young that require reconstruc- 
tion. We have yet to learn that conscience in the primary 
grades is for the most part an artifact and that a sense of duty 
easily becomes a form of precocity in girls in short skirts and 
in boys in knickerbockers. The moral sense in its rudimentary 
stage is very often dwarfed by being overworked and is often 
assumed before it begins to bud, and this always, and in every 
field, brings later apathy, if not repugnance. A few sample 
returns will shed light upon the actual moral status of average 
children and youth. 

L. W. Kline ^ gathered returns from 2,384 children from which 
he infers that judgments of right and justice among children from 
eight to eighteen are more due to emotional than to mental processes. 
Children of this age are, he thinks, more altruistic than selfish, 
country children more so than city children, and finds girls more 
sympathetic than boys and more easily prejudiced. An unfortunate 
girl in a story was, as if to compensate for her misfortune, endowed 
with virtues which were not suggested. The punishments were 
perhaps not only excessive but cruel. In some homes, evidently 
where moralizing has been overdone, there was a feverish desire 
to express ethical views which had interfered with the healthfulness 
of the moral tone. Boys were more original than girls and country 
than city children. 

F. W. Osborn ^ asked forty-five boys and girls between nine and 
eleven what a boy or girl must do to be good and bad. The same 
questions were asked of a similar class of children in the public 
schools. The result showed that the moral ideas of children are 
very concrete. The good boy minds mother, teacher, does not quar- 
rel, lie, whisper, behaves in chapel, etc. More than half of both 
sexes emphasized the importance of obedience. Truthfulness came 
next, but at a great distance. Does this mean that the former 
habit has been best established? Girls are more impressed with the 

' A Study in Juvenile Ethics. Ped. Sem., June, 1903, vol. 10, pp. 239-66. 
'The Ethical Contents of Children's Minds. Educational Review, 1894, 
vol. 8, pp. 143-46. 



MORAL EDUCATION 237 

importance of truthfulness than boys. Ethical ideas evidently arise 
through self-activity. They are first egoistic, but pass rapidly to 
altruism. Children of the rich do not always possess the highest 
moral standards. 

M. L. Roussel ^ studied 3,643 answers, most of them from children 
between eight and thirteen years of age, to the question " What is 
the most beautiful act you ever saw done?" Of these, 128 had 
never seen a beautiful act; 498 were unclassifiable, such as having 
seen a house built, a man play billiards with his feet, or a present. 
Acts of devotion, so-called, 1,535. Of these, 732 had seen people 
rescued from drowning; 199 had seen rescues from fire; 353 had 
seen runaway horses stopped; 31 had seen a mad dog killed. Under 
acts of charity there were 608 mentioned; acts of friendly aid and 
solidarity, 535; restoring lost objects to their owners, 139; help 
to animals, 49; adoption of poor children, 39; separating fighters, 
^2; and there were many miscellaneous deeds. Often the sex was 
not mentioned, but 714 replies, at least, were by girls, and 1,616 by 
boys. Acts of charity were mentioned nearly three times as often 
by girls, and those of general assistance about twice as often. For 
young children beautiful and heroic acts are often not distinguished, 
although perhaps the term " beautiful " is more often used to desig- 
nate acts of devotion rather than of charity. Rescue from drown- 
ing is a classic example, and 37 per cent of such rescues reported 
were by children, although they saved but few people from fire and 
performed few deeds of charity. Nearly half of the total num- 
ber reporting had seen the acts they described, and the rest were 
reported from books and other sources. The latter sometimes lack 
sincerity, as, for instance, where a boy saves an enemy from drown- 
ing and says : " Now I am avenged ! " Theatrical sentiments often 
appear, and sometimes the dishonesty appears in that imaginary 
deeds are seen, or those read of are described as if the writer was 
the hero. There is some lack of sincerity from the opposite cause, 
namely, a certain repugnance to tell their own intimate thoughts 
and feelings. Sometimes John or Mary or other model children 
are described in the first person. The questions answered as an 
exercise in composition are answered with a view to produce a 
favorable literary opinion. Reports that are plainly personal and 
sincere, which are not so very numerous, are easy to detect. Un- 
fortunately some of the acts cited as beautiful are neither natural 
nor really good, and the question is inevitable whether some of these 
good-book deeds really aid in the moral education of the young. 
Moreover, they eclipse the homely and trivial events of daily life. 
Almost the only act which stands for patriotism in the mind of the 
child is dying on the field of battle and thus winning the fame and 
glory of a hero. Whether children really can love their country is 

' Rapport sur la plus belle action. Bulletin de la Societe Libre pour I'Etude 
Psychologique de I'Enfant. Janvier, 1903, pp. 245-52. 



238 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

a question difficult to answer, and is made still more so by the re- 
turns upon this subject. Whether the French text-books on moral 
and civic training, which so often represent children as prodigies 
of virtue, and which is always triumphantly rewarded, sometimes in 
a melodramatic way, where the little hero goes to death rejoicing, 
where the rich man who gives alms is always praised, are wholly 
good is a question ; whether it is sufficient is doubtful. 

Dr. M. Carrara ^ describes a large number of boys in the uni- 
versity town of Cagliari from ten to fourteen who are restless, lazy, 
and unoccupied and infest the streets of this university town in Italy. 
The example of their comrades often affords incitements to crime. 
But very careful studies of fifty of these boys with regard to their 
physical and psychic traits fail to show many of Lombroso's marks 
of criminality. Indeed, the true criminal type of Lombroso is ex- 
tremely rare, although there are often degenerative anomalies. 
True, there have been many crimes, mostly petty, and many com- 
mitments, mostly brief, and occasionally a boy has been committed 
perhaps a dozen times. On the least pretext they pass indifferently 
from one profession to another in a way that shows that the trouble 
is not in the conditions of work but in the nature of the children 
and their insurmountable sloth. Their peculations are bits of coal, 
wood, eggs, and trifles. Not a few of them cut loose from home 
and sleep where they can. It may be they sell matches or shoe- 
strings. The older of these boys are very often guilty of sexual 
crimes. There is some precocity, disease, hetero- and homo-sexual- 
ism. Almost all of the boys maintain their religious practices. 
They are illiterate and defy the law of compulsory school attendance. 
But as a class they are criminals neither by habit nor occasion, nor 
even criminaloid. Whenever they find the right openings for their 
activity their criminal tendencies speedily disappear, so that what 
seems the threatening army of coming criminals really never does 
much harm. 

F. C. Sharp - asked one hundred and forty students in the Univer- 
sity of Wisconsin, some of whom were newcomers from the farm for 
an elementary fourteen weeks' course, and the rest upper class men and 
women in the Arts Department, a number of casuistic questions, each 
set in detailed circumstances, of which the following is an epitome of 
samples : Might a poor man steal from a rich one If only thus could 
he save the life of a starving child? Should children be told of 
Santa Claus? May a youth who promised his father to give up the 
law, which he loved, and enter the latter's business, which he hated, 
revert to his own desires after the father's death, if the business 

* Les Petits Vagabonds de Cagliari. Revue de I'Hypnotisme, 1902, vol. 16, pp. 

135-39- 

2 A Study of the Influence of Custom on the Moral Judgment. University of 
Wisconsin, Madison, 1908, 144 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 239 

grew bad and seemed insupportable? Should a besieged camp give 
up an innocent man to be tortured by Indians, who would otherwise 
overpower and kill all in the camp? May a doctor poison a hope- 
less cancer case, if the patient so desires? May a poor author sell 
the authorship of his book to a rich man? May a poor student 
cancel in mid year his room engagement if he finds another which 
he can occupy without paying, if otherwise he would have to give 
up his education ? Should a man save his own baby, or by turning 
a switch save a train from wreckage? etc. A collection of such 
questions with variations of circumstance was answered in writing 
and later explained and pressed home orally. The replies fall in 
general into two groups : the rigoristic, representing those who had 
always observed the rule of right, more or less regardless of con- 
sequences, sometimes because of the sense of authority or foreign 
pressure, e. g., from God, Scripture, etc. (the latter being most im- 
portant among the youth from the farms) ; while the other class 
were more eudemonistic, or would be guided by general welfare 
or the idea of the greatest good to the greatest number. The 
welfare reason for adhering to the letter of general rules or com- 
mands is based, of course, on the danger of still further infrac- 
tions if a single exception is permitted, the effects that would fol- 
low if everyone acted in this way, etc. The rigoristic attitude 
tends to disappear with intellectual progress, which inclines us to 
look at situations as a whole. Those who do this are more able 
to give reasons for their choices. With the less educated, custom 
or uninherited manner of conduct is more potent, the general con- 
sensus of the community more obligatory, and the conscience of the 
majority is regarded as a safer guide than one's own. The demands 
of society or God rather than an inner, autonomous, categorical im- 
perative are normative. In such cases there is immediacy of judg- 
ment, as in judgments of beauty and taste, about which there is 
really no syllogistic process. None of either class of these students 
had ever studied ethics. Had the Arts answerers done so, they 
would probably have shown still further departure from the stand- 
point of the young farmers. Strange to say, although the number 
of responders of each sex were nearly equal, no account was taken 
of sex differences. Moreover, the author's standpoint is curiously 
apologetic for the very use of the questionnaire method, which he 
does in a confused and ineffective way despite the genuine value of 
his returns, which would be increased were they less sophisticated. 
One conclusion, which is not emphasized, is that the tendency of 
culture, which is to look at moral situations as a whole, is vastly 
harder than to follow simple rules. Customs are potent, and eman- 
cipation from their authority tends to make every moral judgment 
a case by itself, as it should be, with new and special features for 
which no science or prescription is a sufficient guide. The impor- 
tance of each new situation and of each individual looms up into 
the foreground and requires a new verdict, in which innate tem- 



240 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

perament, habit, intelligence, and perhaps heredity reach a new 
equihbrium. From this it seems to follow that, for moral education, 
wider knowledge of social relations is of far more practical im- 
portance than general ethical principles, which are liable to make us 
blind to the special features of cases as they arise and which also 
predispose to casuistry. Specific moral education doubtless tends to 
abate the influence of outer authority and to give us more confidence 
in inner intuition; and when this latter is reasoned on, general wel- 
fare slowly tends to supplant it as the supreme criterion. Thus the 
rigorism that follows the letter and admits no exception is easy, 
is the mark of lowly, simple, undeveloped souls. It is no doubt the 
safest for the masses. To make individual moral judgments requires 
unusual intellectual gifts and culture and exposes those who advance 
toward this standard to at least a period of great moral danger in 
which desires distort the impartiality of reason. The height of this 
standard is one which only a few can attain. Hence, again, we see 
the risk of substituting ratiocination in this field for immediate in- 
tuition. 

Need of Larger and More Liberal Views on Morals. — 
One of the gravest defects and dangers in our present practices 
here is the loss of perspective and orientation. Petty fauhs 
to our myopic conscience are seen in the same perspective as 
great ones. Our Cathohc brethren long since sought to over- 
come this loss of orientation by a system involving a hierarchy, 
at the summit of which were the seven deadly sins : pride, 
avarice, luxury, enmity, anger, appetite, sloth; and the seven 
cardinal virtues: wisdom, courage, temperance, justice, faith, 
hope, and love. These have been made the basis of an excel- 
lent ethical treatise by a Protestant, James Stalker,^ who 
soug"ht to defend this view of the moral world from the charge 
of casuistry in so ranking and grading virtues that, in cases of 
conflict such as often arise, the lesser duty should give way to 
the greater. We may not accept these sins and virtues as 
supreme. The interpretations of some of them are very 
diverse. But they certainly teach us the great lesson that in 
the moral field there are almost infinite gradations of both guilt 
and merit, and that that life is best which takes large views of 
all actions and, instead of the futile aim at absolute perfection, 
does at every crisis the best thing on the whole. Conflict of 
duties, as in the case of Jephthah's daughter, and in a long list 

• The Seven Cardinal Virtues. New York, American Tract Society, 1902, 125 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 241 

of problem plays from the Greek drama down, have a subtle 
attraction for ratiocination not unlike the logical paradoxes 
and fallacies of Zeno, but are only confusing when it comes to 
the issues of practical life. 

Even our academic ideas and customs of teaching ethics 
to college youth are wretchedly unpedagogic, ineffective, and 
casuistic. It is doubtful whether the glib and subtle scholar 
who can pass the best examination on the theories of conscience, 
define Kant's categorical imperative, adjudicate between 
Hedonism and intuitionalism, and characterize the stand- 
point of the great writers from antiquity down on the sanc- 
tions of virtue, is made morally better thereby or worse. The 
intellectualization of morality is a dangerous thing, because in 
this field what can be proven can also be disproven, and Plato, 
who would forbid it for boys and have adolescents flogged 
who wanted to study it, was at any rate half right. Morals is 
primarily a matter of will, conduct, sentiment ; and the youth- 
ful mind is entirely inadequate to deal with the speculative 
problems in this most difficult of all fields. The idea of the 
formal methods now in use, of didacticism, of cramming for 
an examination in ethics to be marked and ranked, is essentially 
absurd, if not demoralizing in itself, for it misplaces the stress, 
of endeavor and tends to substitute mere study for practice, v 

Effects of Feminism on Moral Ediication. — While very 
few, if any, text-books or even essays on morals in general 
have ever been written by women, perhaps because their inter- 
est in the subject, while it is strong, focuses upon so few 
specific aspects of it, it is their influence that has been the 
dominating factor in the present method of laying chief stress 
upon goodness and in refusing to depict evil and its conse- 
quences, as under male influence and once in the pulpit when, 
in the days of hell fire, the latter was prominent. But now, 
save in the matter of intemperance and cigarettes alone, in 
impressing the evils of which they appreciate the use of ap- 
palling instances, most mothers, women teachers, and men 
whose mentation is habitually in a feminine atmosphere, think 
that girls and even boys do not need to know much about bad- 
ness. They still cherish ideals of ignorant innocence and moral 
naivete, such as used to culminate in convents. " Why know 
malaria and smallpox in order to be well ? " This is a pro- 
17 



242 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

found and, in its effects, often a disastrous error. Knowing 
evil is not halfway to doing it, but often the best of all pre- 
ventives and deterrents. Why do so many young girls go 
wrong? Because not properly instructed and thus not armed 
against the wiles of the tempter. What is their plaint and that 
of boys infected by vice? It is over and over again with 
tedious monotony : " I did not know ; why didn't my parent, 
teacher, pastor, doctor, tell me ? " One method of conserving 
health is by describing the dangers of diseases and pointing out 
the consequences of unhygienic modes of living. One method 
of advancing Christianity is by showing the bad results of 
paganism and unbelief. That boys need to know something 
about bad boys as well as good ones is almost a platitude. 
What boy ever did, does, and however tenderly sheltered, 
can grow up thus ignorant of evil ? A universe of light, with 
no shadows in it, would be as monotonous and vacuous as one 
of darkness ; we can see as much in the one as in the other. Aji 
artist must know and use black and dark shades to bring out 
white and light ones by contrast. The very essence of moral 
education, consists in part of warnings and example. What 
would the temperance teacher do without illustrations of the 
evil of intemperance ? To inculcate courage, we must tell about 
cowardice ; to teach honesty, we must show the evils of lying 
and deceit and their bad consequences. Can anything be more 
obvious ? Knowledge in advance preforms moral choices. 
Having incited children to choose aright in ideal cases, the 
chances are increased that they will choose aright in those of 
real life. How can our Lord have been " tempted in all 
points," if He had not known about evil ? I plead for knowing 
evil as a safeguard against doing it. We must know the 
enemy in order to effectively resist or attack him. But this is 
a very different thing from joining forces with him. We 
study disease to avoid it and to escape its evils. Knowledge of 
it is not infection with it. Only Christian Scientists refuse to 
recognize and perhaps deny the existence of illness. The best 
medicine is preventive. The same is true of moral diseases. 
A great function of ethics is preventive. That we can often 
turn evil to good account as an incentive to virtue, no more 
makes evil good than the fact that Plato pointed out a drunk- 
ard to the Athenian youth to warn them against his state. 



MORAL EDUCATION 243 

justified the besotted condition of him who was thus made an 
object lesson. The very function of knowledge is to save 
from error. It is getting experience by proxy. Thus we Util- 
ize the blunders and mistakes of others in order to prevent 
their intrusion into our own lives. The most interesting and 
most useful chapter in logic is that which deals with fallacies, 
as I have found by long experience in teaching it, and the more 
common and insidious they seem to be, the greater immunity 
against their habitual use the student acquires. The very first 
thing a reformer must know and know thoroughly, if he 
would be effective, is all the details and ramifications of the 
evil he would correct. Knowledge of cause advances the suc- 
cessful application of cures, and great moral movements that 
have lifted the world to higher levels have been led by those 
who knew best and felt most keenly the inmost nature of the 
iniquities they combated. Indeed, many psychologists are 
now teaching that the most fundamental characteristic of con- 
sciousness itself is remedial. If we always did aright, we 
should no more know that we have a conscience than he whose 
heart, lungs, and stomach work aright is conscious of their ex- 
istence. If sin has found lodgment in the soul, we evict it by 
clearly envisaging it, realizing it fully ourselves, and perhaps 
in some cases confessing, which leads to forsaking it. 

If one objects to this, that uniform goodness seems a rather 
dull and monotonous thing to boys, and urges that decent boys 
can now have all sorts of good times without associating with 
bad boys, I reply, of course they can and should; one of the 
most significant advances of modern times is the many and 
diversified activities in which boys can now indulge that are 
only helpful and pure, and these must be developed in every 
way and in as many directions as possible. Many of these 
things, now good by every token, were once in narrow, more 
Puritanic times, thought to be bad, but have been won over 
from the domain of the devil and sanified. 

The trouble is, however, that this has not gone far enough. 
So long as an innocent game of cards or billiards, dancing 
under proper conditions, an occasional boy fight for a good 
cause, certain school offenses, the heinousness of which is that 
they are chiefly against the teacher's ease or conventional ideas 
of order, an occasional bit of slang, or even a swear word, a 



244 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

little swerving of truth as it seems to adults, a throb of anger, 
occasional association with street gangs, with a transient taint 
of their ways, etc., are regarded as worse than they really are 
and are treated as major instead of as minor faults of the 
young, their life is robbed of some color. A lad who has never 
done anything that he or his fond mother ever regrets, has 
something the matter with him. My mail has for years 
abounded with letters from aunts, mothers, and lady teachers 
who are distressed about the faults of certain boys, mostly in 
the seething age of the early teens, faults in the majority of 
cases which are rather petty and transient. Such boys have 
often been too sheltered, and when they break away a little 
and meet with half-bad associates, they are far more liable to 
be infected than if they had been a little more exposed earlier. 
There is no escaping the fact, unintelligible though it usually 
is to mothers, that just as inoculation gives immunity against 
a grave, by giving a mild form of disease, so there is a class 
of minor offenses and peccadillos, some personal experience 
with which gives boys immunity against graver sins. It does 
so by bringing into play regrets and higher powers of control 
and rectification, otherwise dormant in the soul, and which, 
like everything else, need occasional exercise in order to come 
to full maturity and strength. The ordinary Sunday School 
and ladylike morality does not understand this, and thus very 
often fails to deal aright with such cases. Man, and even 
animals, learn in matters of conduct by the method which, in 
the laboratory, we call that of trial and error. It is thus that 
all experience has been acquired. If the wisdom that error has 
inculcated were obliterated from the life of any individual, how- 
ever good he may be, very much of the best in him would be 
lost. It is along precisely these lines that much observation 
and thought have lately been directed, and it is this that I wish 
teachers to realize a little more clearly ; for it is here that the 
woman's standpoint, noble though it is, often needs to be com- 
pared with and modified by that of a thoughtful, high-minded 
but world-wise, boy-knowing and virile man. 

The moral differences between the sexes are profound. 
Convention usually misinterprets it but does not underestimate 
it, for it is innate and inexpugnable. The virtues of a man and 
of a woman are diverse in many essential respects, as are their 



MORAL EDUCATION 245 

relations to the home, industry, and poHtics. Manhness and 
womanHness need a different regimen to bring them to their 
perfect flower. Patriotism, parenthood, honor, courage — how 
very different these are for each sex, not to speak of duty in 
general and religion ! Men and women each have their own 
code and set of excellencies and even those that are more 
nearly the same in each have distinctions which moral peda- 
gogues cannot ignore. Thus there is sex in virtue and a neuter 
ethics has its place only in the theoretical, but hardly in the 
practical, life. In Sparta, woman cultivated masculine virtues. 
Now, under the influence of school dames, boys and young 
men are prone as probably never before in history to affect, if 
not to really have, feminine ideals of morality. Here, then, 
should be bifurcation of method and matter. Boys and girls 
are reliving a stage when the field of the activity of the sexes 
differed very widely. If boys are taught girls' virtues, then 
when they become men they break into their own domain of 
conduct untrained for it. Thus, when masculation has fully 
come, they are more raw and crude morally than if they had 
had no instruction, because when their sex asserts itself they 
revolt at the virtues they have been taught because they do not 
fit their nature and needs and have come to regard the virtuous 
life as a womanish thing; and in throwing it off they become 
unvirtuous. The strong nature rebels at the restraints which 
female mentors tend to weave about budding manhood; and 
because they are not familiarized with other standards and 
have not been taught to appreciate the virtues of robust, virile 
manhood, dangers ensue which might be avoided. Thus, the 
overdominance of able, noble, mature women upon callow, 
young men not infrequently really results in a moral debacle 
later as a reaction. As the school-bred gentleness, kindness, 
forbearance, sweet temper, courtesy, obedience, order, pro- 
priety, peacefulness, begin to pall upon the moral palate, the 
youth does at least one of two things when his manhood 
bourgeons : either he revolts and riots in bad ways for a time, 
or else begins to decay from within from some form of secret 
vice, which latter usually comes with just this effeminate pat- 
tern of outer morality which is the best possible mask of all 
to conceal the bad from the good women. I have come to 
suspect most boys in the teens who are the idols of their own 



246 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

fond mothers or the paragons of their lady teachers, although 
I would by no means intimate that all of them are bad. 

Mother and Child. — Perhaps the most fundamental moral 
training, in the large sense of diathesis, begins or can begin 
before birth. Planned procreation under the most favorable 
conditions for both parents doubtless can do far more than is 
yet known to give a right, eugenic momentum to the primal 
power of heredity ; but this mighty and mysterious theme must 
here be left to the larger knowledge of the future, as must the 
probably no less significant matter of mate choosing. During 
gestation very much depends upon the mood, temper, health 
and occupation of the mother. She who does most for herself 
does most for her child, for she is now living for two. If she 
is habitually tranquil, poised, she is registering these states 
upon the organism of her child. Proper nutrition, exercise, 
and sleep enhance the original moral endowment of the babe, 
while the effects of strain, worry, excitement and ill-health take 
from nature and add to the task of nurture. Newborn babes 
are very susceptible to habit, and the regularity in feeding and 
sleeping can be made almost mechanical. They are profoundly 
affected by inevitableness, as they are by kindness in all minis- 
trations. Touch is the chief vehicle of communication between 
mother and babe, and pats, caresses, handling and plenty of it, 
if judicious, preforms the soul for moral tractability and safe- 
guards it against incipient perversity. Nursing, too, as I have 
elsewhere pointed out, has a high ethical significance for both 
mother and child, and without it there is moral as well as physi- 
cal loss. The very presence of the parent early increases the 
child's disposition to do what pleases and brings smiles, and 
to avoid what displeases. The mother is, in a sense, in the 
very place of God to her child, cultivating in it just those senti- 
ments of love, respect and service, that now develop toward 
her and later are transferred to a heavenly parent, and that 
constitute the essence of religion. The parents' psychic and 
physical characters affect the child far beyond the conscious- 
ness of either and almost nothing is lost upon the latter, so 
that parenthood throughout is a thing of unfathomable respon- 
sibility for the more fundamental things that go to make up 
character. It is always setting copy and example to be fol- 
lowed by the imitative instinct in matters which precept, when 



MORAL EDUCATION 247 

the age for it arrives, cannot begin to equal. At this stage, 
if at all, basal traits — temperament, diathesis, instinct, pas- 
sions, feelings, temper, etc. — are modifiable. When intelli- 
gence dawns, commands should be few but carefully chosen 
and inexorable ; and prohibitions must be carefully and relent- 
lessly followed up and enforced, for the very opportunity of 
evasion tempts to falsehood. Moral education needs an arti- 
ficial environment with natural penalties that follow immedi- 
ately upon bad acts, for delay and the remoter consequences of 
misconduct are too far away for the myopic mind of the young. 
It always implies some lack of respect for the parent if the 
child asks for reasons for commands, for complete trust would 
follow implicitly even a hint. Hence, too much explanation 
tends to diminish reverence for the personality of the parent 
or teacher and involves some degree of abdication of their 
authority. Children easily become priggish in cjuestioning for 
reasons ; and fond parents explain at length, pleased at their 
child's desire to know, and thinking he really understands, 
when in fact he is only playing upon the parents' w^eakness 
and immensely flattered to be talked to like an adult in matters 
in which in fact he has only the faintest glimmer of intelli- 
gence, though he may possibly become an effective little casu- 
ist, and argumentative relations between him and the parent 
take the place of plain, simple lawgiving. An Eastern proverb 
says, " If your child, when you command him, asks why, flog 
him, for he insults your superior wisdom and judgment and 
is wasting energy in discussion which should be used in obedi- 
ence." The parent's word is law, is a mandate which the 
child will welcome and rejoice to follow just in proportion as 
he respects and loves. 

Flogging. — From this point of view, physical castigation 
must not be entirely dispensed wath, either at home or in the 
school, for boys. Its possible brutality is obvious as the rec- 
ords of the anticruelty society abundantly show. But under 
the influence of female teachers and overtender school boards, 
flogging should not be so restricted as is now usual in this 
country. I have studied its effects in England and believe 
that, wisely adjusted, it saves many boys from evil courses, 
wakes up the overindulged and easy going, and tends to breed 
a healthy spirit of manliness, gives respect for authority and 



248 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

anticipates for youth the penalties that Hfe has in store for 
them later if they go astray. In many cases it should be in- 
flicted at once, that the culprit may feel the righteous indigna- 
tion his fault arouses in kind but just adults. The better 
nature of some obstinate, impudent, vicious boys fairly cries 
out for the rod, so great is their need of it. It reaches cases 
which nothing else can and saves many in specific instances I 
have collected, turning the whole tide of life in the right direc- 
tion at critical points. It is moral surgery applied to distorted 
and perverse wills. It can help even those now sometimes 
called morally insane, at least in the incipient stages of this 
mysterious and complicated type of psychic disease. For boys 
in or near the teens, it is sometimes the chief duty of the father 
to administer it ; but, alas, " Where are the fathers " now in 
the work of education in either school or home ? A little fear 
of it is wholesome and goes a great way and gives the best 
possible temper to love. In this respect our moral pedagogy is 
too soft ; we must not always be too precipitately and ardently 
anxious to forgive. Still less should flogging be banished 
from reformatory institutions for the young. True, it de- 
grades; but some need degradation of just this kind. Of 
course, a regime of kindness is often best for those who are 
callous to too much punishment; but to know that those in 
power cannot or dare not flog gives insubordination an unfair 
advantage and stimulates the rank growth of some of the 
worst faults. The earlier it is applied, the less drastic it needs 
to be. Hence, the peculiar gift of discerning crimes and vices 
in their tender bud is a great desideratum ; while even in their 
more developed stage, the rod may work a wondrous and per- 
haps sudden change in older, hardened youth. There are 
cases of this kind, though happily very rare, in which the dura- 
tion and severity of the castigation must be kept up to a point 
where the heart of the inflictor rebels, and he would fain stop 
in mercy, but simply must go on till the obduracy of the vic- 
tim breaks either into tears or promises of submission, begging 
for cessation, etc., for only then is the reformatory effect 
secured, while a point less would result in still greater obduracy 
next time. Hence, if recourse is deliberately had to this 
remedy, it must go on to the end if flesh and blood can endure 
it. The boy who will die rather than yield is either physically 



MORAL EDUCATION 249 

weak or morally insane, or perhaps both ; he is at any rate in- 
docile. This would be my prescription for the now rampant 
hoodlumism and for certain forms of moral obliquity which 
are far less incorrigible than is usually thought. Pleasure and 
pain are the sovereign masters of life, and educators must 
study again more deeply the art of administering the latter. 

Scolding. — Of milder penalties scolding may and should 
be made a fine art. In point of fact, however, it often degener- 
ates to nagging, querulousness, and fault-finding, which soon 
becomes ineffective from its very monotonousness. But it 
may condense to a pithy epitome of the prohibitive view of the 
whole line of conduct. Round, drastic characterization of bad 
conduct, reflecting the way in which when full blown it will be 
regarded by others, its results later, and the ruthless revelation 
of secret motives, helps the perpetrator to see himself as others 
see him and cures many symptoms of even hysteria. It can do 
much for moral perversions. Judicious, timely, personal, and 
sometimes even public censure is a potent therapeutic for the 
moralist. A little just and helpful invective may turn the 
sentiment of a whole class or even school if uttered by a usu- 
ally poised and respected teacher of whose fundamental kind- 
ness of heart all are assured. Effective moral influences are 
not cold and intellectual, but hot from the heart. Why repress 
truly righteous indignation for a child's misconduct? The 
soul of childhood has many strata superposed one upon the 
other; and while the most conscious or superficial ones may 
rebel, the teacher who has the support of the deeper sentiments 
on his side wins a great victory in the inmost being of his 
pupils. In fact, this is preaching at its very best. If a teacher 
prefers popularity to following the course of his own deepest 
convictions, his pupils feel it, and the real quality of their re- 
gard suffers subtle deterioration, although perhaps neither he 
nor they recognize the change. In this important field we need 
special ethico-pedagogical studies by psychologists. A half- 
concealed, half-revealed art of great practical worth needs to 
be wrought out to a finish and put to work, and practiced a 
little in normal schools, even if in a moot way. Right denun- 
ciation has an eloquence and even a rhetoric all its own. 

Praise. — Its counterpart, praise, should also be both studied 
and cultivated. To praise as well as to blame aright is a high 



250 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

educational art. Both pride and shame are potent motives. 
To select obscure personal acts that are rightly motivated and 
to bring them forth to the light of day anonymously, it may be ; 
to detect incipient group tendencies that contain magnificent 
potencies; to keep close to the thrilling life and interests of 
classes and individuals ; to be ready with the word fitly spoken 
and sometimes to interpret dubious occurrences in a favorable 
way, may turn the current at critical moments and cause 
psychic tides to set in the right direction. This often requires 
delicacy and a light, deft touch. It must come straight from 
the heart and not seem for effect, as pupils are so prone to 
regard all moral utterances of adults in their behoof. Eulogy 
and panegyric are very ancient and effective moral engines; 
and Aristotle thought the business of the orator, at a time 
when the highest education culminated in his art, was to let no 
great or even good deed in life go without its due meed of 
public praise. This ofhcial commendation degenerated only 
when it could be bought. Meanwhile mentors among the 
pupils should be secretly on watch for golden deeds and words 
among their mates for the teacher's benefit, and thus he should 
be en rapport with his pupils' lives outside the school; and 
along with warning and admonition, should attain and utilize 
methodic appreciation of all possible varieties of merit. Thus, 
he should, in a sense, stand to his pupils in the place of com- 
munities which will later approve or disapprove their character 
and conduct. He should be an outer, supplementing and de- 
termining the form of a later, inner, conscience. 

Rezuards. — So, too, over against penalties should always 
be rewards ; and they and their effects should be most carefully 
and systematically studied and administered. Prizes, badges, 
and deturs of many kinds should anticipate the premiums 
which the world will bestow upon those who best serve it. To 
suspect or neglect the all-pervading motive of rivalry is a 
wasteful and colossal blunder. Athletics with the uncontroll- 
able psychic enginery that supports them should teach us this. 
So far as the best win the best, this is a moral world. It is a 
low motive to be good for money or for gifts, but this is better 
than not to be good at all ; and with growth the baser, naturally 
inclined, gives place to the higher motive, and material are re- 
placed by more spiritual trophies. We recognize this principle 



MORAL EDUCATION 251 

in intellectual work by scholarships, marks, grades, ranks, as 
the French have done and as the Carnegie prize for heroism 
now does here; while competition and rivalry are the main- 
spring of business. ■ It is also the method of nature in the sur- 
vival of the fittest and best, and so in the school, which is an 
artificial epitome of life, we should attempt the same impelling 
force. 

Fighting. — In pondering these themes, I for one have very 
gradually come to the conclusion that the current interpreta- 
tions of Christianity are in some respects inadequate to the 
present situation. Jesus did not turn His cheek to the smiter 
in dealing with the money changers in the temple court, and 
the Prince of Peace brought a sword. So I think that in our 
codes and ideals for the young, while recognizing the virtue of 
amity as paramount, we should not exclude but cultivate in 
due season a degree of the element of righteous indignation 
and of conflict. The boy who cannot and will not fight upon 
occasion is a coward and a milksop. He needs some experi- 
ence with the wager of battle to toughen and ripen his moral 
fiber. To take an unmerited blow or an insult meekly means 
lack of virility. What would the good lady teacher or mamma 
who seeks to destroy the fighting mettle in her son think of an 
escort who would not or could not defend her from affront or 
assault? The world admires the great fighters, and cultivated 
men crowd to see even pugilistic encounters. The sight of two 
boys with clenched teeth and fists and glaring eyes pummeling 
each other may not be edifying to ladies, but it always is so to 
crowds, who usually want them to fight it out,' provided they 
do so fairly, and hope to see the best win. Those who inter- 
fere on such occasions are usually either officials who must 
follow orders, even if reluctantly, or Christian peaceablists, or 
else friends of the weaker boy who fear for him. But to whip 
and be whipped occasionally in a good cause, or perhaps some- 
times in a dubious one, is a beneficent experience for both 
parties. The casualties are probably insignificant compared 
with those of the most popular of our great academic athletic 
games. In my school days in the country, as in many board- 
ing schools now, especially in England, such battles were so 
common that each boy knew his master; and one of the best 
moral experiences in my life was in being unmercifully 



252 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thrashed by a better boy for a real fault, and in myself once 
trouncing a bully after nearly two hours of rough-and-tumble 
fighting behind a barn, with a group of schoolmates looking 
on. At the end we were both somewhat gory, flushed, tousled 
and torn, minus buttons, etc. ; but I am glad to say that he was 
most so. I know that I am a better, a more courageous, and 
a happier man for having trimmed that rowdy schoolmate, 
who is now station agent and always tells me that it was a 
good thing for him. I coincide with his opinion, and am 
proud of my part of the transaction, as he declares he is of 
having been overcome by me. Thus, if a teacher had dragged 
us apart, he would have robbed both of a mutually pleasing and 
profitable experience. So I say that good, gamy boys should 
sometimes fight, if they do so fairly, and especially if there is 
a moral issue at stake. I often wonder whether the time will 
not again come when in the armamentarium of disciplinary 
methods, one will not be for the teacher to occasionally con- 
demn boys to this wager of personal encounter, hand to hand, 
and eye to eye, in certain emergencies, especially if he can 
forecast victory upon the right side. A principal in a board- 
ing school told me of several occasions where he thought it 
wise to settle disputes in this way, and to say to boys not old 
or strong enough to be in much danger of permanently injur- 
ing each other : " I see no other way than for you to fight it 
out " ; and he thought the morale of the school was made more 
vital thereby. He has sometimes had contestants use gloves 
and observe rules. If some critic objects that this is a pagan 
note in ethics, I reply : Not necessarily, and even if it were so, 
it does not follow that it is to be condemned because of its 
origin. Indeed, this method for adult contestants, if they must 
fight, has been of late earnestly advocated as having many 
advantages over the use of dangerous weapons in duels. 

Revenge. — But has revenge or vengeance any place in 
moral pedagogy? This is a grave and more debatable ques- 
tion. Steinmetz, Ree, Edward Westermarck ^ and others have 
studied the psychology of this instinct, which seems to be a 
reaction of self-feeling against injury. At first it need not take 
a definite direction, and the sense of inferiority may vent itself 

^The Essence of Revenge. Mind, N. S., 1898, vol. 7, pp. 289-310. 



MORAL EDUCATION 253 

with a total want of discrimination. Many cases are given of 
outraged savages who kill animals, lacerate their own bodies 
at funerals in a fit of revenge against fate, and injure the inno- 
cent; and yet even animals usually select the right object of 
their vengeance. It may be that revenge, which is one link in 
a chain for which resentment is the best general name, is so 
effective a weapon against cruelty that the most revengeful 
tribes are most successful in survival. In blood feuds, there is 
some direction of vengeance against members of the tribe or 
family of the offender. Some codes forbid a man to be sacri- 
ficed for a woman or for a commoner, and death must be 
avenged on one of the same rank, sex, age, and maybe with the 
same weapon. Pride enters but may not be so dominant as, 
e. g., Steinmetz thinks. It is often a social duty and may be 
combined with sympathy. Cutting off an offending member 
is not unknown. Intentional injury is most provocative, and 
even savages usually distinguish between culpa and dolor. 
We must always distinguish between desire to inflict a coun- 
ter-pain and that to remove a cause of pain. This impulse is 
very complex. Now, it is a slow, hard process for the child to 
consign penalty for an injury done to it to the slow, distant, 
and uncertain process of law ; and for many petty outrages of 
the child's sense of justice, this is perhaps well and lays a 
better foundation in its soul for a sense of equity later. I in- 
cline to believe that revenge should be allowed a place, if a 
limited one, in the unwritten code of boyhood, and that it 
should by no means be always and everywhere tabooed. It can 
sometimes accomplish good as nothing else can in scotching 
the instinct of the bully that he can do all he will with impun- 
ity. Vengeance is often very cleverly devised by smaller boys, 
sometimes with almost ideal, poetic effectiveness. It instills a 
wholesome feeling that outrages cannot be perpetrated and 
provoke no reaction. Unlimited forgiveness often goes with 
cowardice. " Do not get satisfaction by taking it out of a 
smaller boy, but get back at the aggressor somehow, some- 
time," said a father to his son who had been deliberately rolled 
in and plastered with mud by a bigger boy ; and so the son with 
his mates succeeded in treating the aggressor with a good dose 
of his own medicine in the same puddle next day, with a few 
extra daubs on the face by way of interest, and the scales of 



254 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

justice again swung even for both parties and the Scriptures 
were fulfilled : " for with what measure ye mete, it shall be 
measured to you again." A pail of foul water was hung on a 
gate and tipped by twine at night upon a boy who was called 
out of the house and was soaked. The offender had no gate, 
and a week passed, when one night he was called by the gang 
whistle and tripped on a wire, which tipped a bigger pail of 
fouler water on him, suspended on poles ; and again a moral 
lesson was given and received, while the mechanical wits of 
the avengers were sharpened. The lex talionis may be a great 
quickener of ingenuity and I ween has large pedagogic possi- 
bilities in it, which may be developed by astute teachers and 
turned to excellent account in some of the exigencies of boy 
life. 

What real boy can be taught to love his enemies without 
danger of moral emasculation ? He must and will hate them ; 
and the moral teacher can really do little more than help make 
sure that the enemies are abundantly worthy of enmity, and 
then bid it Godspeed. In a world so full of evil and ill-doers, 
the maxim " Make no enemies " is craven and stultifies con- 
science itself. Wrath must be in a good cause and then let 
loose to do its purifying work. " I will repay," saith the Lord, 
but He often needs human aid to do so ; and why should we be 
loth to give it when repayment is so sorely needed? Nay, 
what adult would not meet the great Pacificator at death with 
a more open countenance, if he had paid to the full all his just 
debts in this regard? This I find in the gentleman's, though 
not perhaps in the lady's, version of Christianity. Those 
brought up under the influence of the latter can never hate the 
Lord's enemies with an exceeding great and bitter hatred, and 
to be a good hater is more ethical than to be steeped in sugary 
benignity with uniform and monotonous love for all alike. 

Profanity. — Again, the true Christian young gentleman 
never swears or curses unless for adequate occasion, but even 
this may arise ; and when it does he must choose between the 
etiquette of the drawing-room with ladies present, and the in- 
stinctive reactions of a man who can rise, verbally, at least, to 
the full height of an extreme occasion and give things that are 
damned in their nature the proper adjectives, with no euphem- 
ism or circumlocution, as George Washington did. He is a 



MORAL EDUCATION 255 

moral degenerate who uses the strongest expletives on the 
most trivial occasions; but not so he who applies words of 
awfullest connotation to persons and acts which nothing else 
can fittingly designate. While insisting for the young upon 
the adjuration : " Swear not at all," may we not add, " unless 
upon some exceptionally desperate occasion where profanity 
is no longer vulgarity, as it almost always is in fact, although 
it may become sublime and eloquent." In this sense swearing 
is permissible, but only for great minds on great occasions. 
Utter prohibition of the strongest of all strong languages 
is fit only for infantile or senile souls, for ladies, clergymen, 
and professors, and other gown-wearers. Here our baby 
morals are so cabined, cribbed, and confined that they do not 
fit youth, still less men, and must be stretched and the points 
superseded by larger codes. 

Stealing. — Honesty regarding property is hard to teach, 
although as Kline and France ^ and others have shown, a 
sense of ownership is developed in infants of very tender years. 
To have things set apart as one's own, to do with as one will, is 
very dear to the infant soul, for the ego extends through all we 
possess. Children are often hoarders and collectors.- They 
brook no infringement upon their property rights — perhaps 
not even the touching of what is theirs by others. Their 
method of exchange is barter; and slowly, step by step, as the 
money sense unfolds, they come to appreciate the virtues 
taught by children's banks. Ownership is one of the best 
schools for responsibility, especially if of living things as pets, 
the care of which is an important moralizing agency. But 
money is a great idealizer and quickens manifold meditations 
as to all its possible uses. To accumulate, lay by, and store for 
the future brings foresight, prudence, economy, and thrift. To 
own also teaches respect for others' possessions; and even 
greed for gain by those who have much rarely prompts theft. 
Stealing is the vice of the ownerless. To have w4iat has cost 
pain, effort, and denial to get, gives a just sense of worth and 
best teaches what real ownership, which should always and 

^ L. W. Kline and C. J. France, The Psychology of Ownership. Ped. Sem.., Dec, 
1899, vol. 6, pp. 421-470. 

2 See Caroline Frear Burk, The Collecting Instinct. Aspects of Child Life and 
Education, by G. Stanley Hail and others, Boston, Ginn & Co., 1907, pp. 205-240. 



2S6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

everywhere represent service, means. Those who have felt the 
joy of possessing the well-earned fruits of toil are least liable to 
rob others of them. The studies of children's thefts show that 
they are often perpetrated with great ethical discrimination, 
e. g., against those who have much, who did not earn it, do 
not use, or acquired it unjustly, are miserly, or themselves 
grasping. It is often reprisal committed to restore justice. 
They would not steal from a popular child or a kind neighbor. 
I often close my house for months in the summer and the boys 
of the neighborhood appropriate many bushels of fruit which 
grows there, seeming to reassert the old rights of the people 
to the common, all over my grounds and even on the piazza. 
" He has no business to have two houses when he can use only 
one at a time," one boy said. One June I convened the boys 
and told them, as the Lord did our first parents, that they 
might have all but the fruits of one tree if they would save 
that for me. They thought that fair and, as there was no 
tempting serpent among them, they improved upon the con- 
duct of the original Eden dwellers, for in September the fruits 
of my forbidden tree were almost untouched. They had not 
only refrained from it themselves but had fought off other 
boys not in the pact, and I judge largely because they thought 
me, as I overheard, " a rather good one." I hope I was not 
compounding a felony. 

Meum and Hmm are hard to learn without suum. Sav- 
ages have much in common owned by the tribe, although there 
are always some personal possessions. Many things in civil- 
ized households are simply " ours," i. e., they belong to the 
family. It is very white theft for children to take edibles, 
and not very black for them to take occasional small sums of 
money from their parents. In the days of slavery the negroes 
half owned their masters' goods, feeling sometimes that things 
were theirs because earned by their labor. The world recog- 
nizes that the theft of food to appease hunger or starvation is 
the least venial of all forms of peculation. And yet, of all the 
forms of petty larceny which is the chief legal misdemeanor 
of boys, edibles lead. Hence, a good family table removes a 
strong temptation to steal. As a psychological instrument for 
measuring out and punishing guilt here, our criminal law is 
the most clumsy and wooden of devices, except where the 



MORAL EDUCATION 257 

methods of the juvenile court in dealing with all classes of 
swipers has mitigated its evils. Often the chief charm of 
thieving for boys is the battle of wits involved. Thus the 
gamin frequently steals what he does not particularly want in 
order to indulge or show off his cleverness in evading owners, 
cops, locks, and other safeguards, and may risk life and limb 
in quest of the exquisite charm of filching. A boy of twelve 
who woke me mornings by rapping at my door, once surprised 
me by having prepared a bath with every detail arranged, and 
while I was taking it, went out, climbed the eavespout to the 
second-story window of my bedroom where my clothes lay, 
stole my pocketbook, climbed down, and later when I came 
down to breakfast, gave it to me explaining that he had long 
wondered if he could do it, until he had to try. Next day, 
after pondering over my duty, I gave him his reward — a 
quarter for his honesty and a spanking with the back of my 
hairbrush for his dishonesty, though I am not quite sure that 
it was the judgment of a Daniel. He doubtless half intended 
to keep his plunder, but did not quite dare. Surely large 
possessions are regarded as unjust and are themselves a chal- 
lenge to enforce equalization for sharing, either by craft or by 
force. The Spartans made discipline in thieving part of their 
education, to brighten the wits of boys and sharpen them in 
strategy and in daring to conceive and execute ; and not a few 
children's games are really plays at theft. Even the casuistry 
of explanation and excuse upon detection provokes ingenuity. 
Does not our money-mad age, where property is God, tend to 
make us treat juvenile peculations au grand serieux, when 
they should often be ignored, winked at, or at most only made 
the text of concise admonitions, or pilloried with satire and 
innuendo? Fraud is the great horror of all whose lives are 
devoted to acquiring wealth, and has not this contributed to 
magnify a type of peccadillo so germane to childhood, because 
to trifle with money is to some almost as sacrilegious as blas- 
phemy against the Holy Ghost? At any rate, if I extenuate 
this proclivity of the young too much, most interested in this 
subject do so too little, so that we may at least appeal to a 
truth that lies between us. 

Acquaintance with Badness. — The moral value of good 
companions, like good habits, cannot be overestimated. They 
18 



258 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

influence, in many respects, far more than parents and adults 
can. Children are known by the company they keep. Evil is 
particularly contagious among- the young, and their guardians 
must be always circumspect and vigilant. This side of the 
matter we know and feel and its importance cannot be over- 
estimated. But let us not, on the other hand, ignore the fact 
that good children do, and need to have some personal ac- 
quaintance with bad ones. As Sparta and Plato would show 
the young drunken men as warnings against intemperance, so 
there must be a wide and variegated range of moral observa- 
tion to furnish an adequate basis for moral distinction. While 
I would make no concessions of this kind in the realm of 
sex, I would be much more tolerant than is thought wise by 
many, and perhaps most, of even a little personal experience 
occasionally in sampling most other kinds of badness. A boy 
who has never, never run wild with a gang, never puffed a 
cigarette, or felt a little tobacco nausea, never sipped liquor 
enough to know its smell and taste from soda water, knows 
nothing in his own person of what fire water would do to him ; 
if he never played a game of chance or gambled with or for 
pennies and marbles, never tried to cheat or planned a runa- 
way, never once tasted the guilty exhilaration of truancy on a 
bright spring morning, but has been a prize boy with never 
an absent or tardy mark for years ; one who has never hurt an 
animal, but has always been ideally tender to dogs, cats, frogs, 
etc., who is chronically polite to girls, respectful and never 
impudent to all his elders and superiors, never committed a 
trespass, stole rides, fished, if he was a country boy, on Sun- 
day or in posted brooks, bathed in forbidden, dangerous places, 
felt the pangs of conscience if he found a quarter and could 
not find its loser, been unkempt, dirty, soiled, torn new clothes, 
tried to bait or fool a cop, possibly been haled to the police 
court for some prank, and there had a mild taste of how the 
laws deal with those who break them, had spells of laziness, 
idleness, day dreaming, during the years of more rapid growth, 
wild spasms of joy, etc., when feeling in all its rich diapason 
was awakening, also periods of moodiness and sullenness, fits 
of insubordination when his own will was beginning to bour- 
geon or when the passion for self-assertion was felt; the boy 
who has not boasted, swaggered, bullied younger chaps, had his 



MORAL EDUCATION 259 

own experiences in gorging green apples and other toothsome 
but dangerous and tabooed dainties, when the new adolescent 
appetite was adjusting to its changed dietary; the boy of the 
avenue who never had a point of contact with any slum pal 
or crony — such a youth cannot possibly have much vital knowl- 
edge of moral evil and good. In all such things a touch, but 
not too much, is an essential part of moral seasoning and 
development. Boys feel this and are right. It is the prohibi- 
tive teaching of a kind of Sunday-school type of morality 
reenforced by maternal codes, and not the boys, that need re- 
construction. Teachers of morals to the young who do not 
recognize all this are simply dense or dishonest; and boys un- 
consciously feel them to be insincere and so flaunt them. They 
have nearly all done about all these things and know that they 
have been broadened by it ; so to teach otherwise is an affecta- 
tion. It is immoral teaching of morality, a department of 
pedagogy in which hypocrisy culminates. 

Now the juvenile soul revolts from such repressions, 
craves and pants for actual personal experience, and always has 
tasted and will, like our first parents, taste of forbidden fruit, 
to know good and evil personally. For even girls, cloistered 
though they be, but especially for open-air boys, the prayer not 
to be led into temptation is a fatuitous and iridescent dream. 
We should rather pray for all the temptation that we can 
successfully and triumphantly overcome, even as some psycho- 
logical educators are now urging, for all the individual 
experience with sin which we can completely react from into 
habitual virtue with no permanent scar or taint of body or soul. 
Many theologians have taught that the fall brought salvation 
and so that both together netted more good than ill to the 
race. The psychology of religion shows that there is a pecul- 
iar Augustinian type of sanctity illustrated by many a saint 
since that is due to a reaction from even vicious lives. Prob- 
ably this is not the best type of virtue, and very few indeed 
would seriously prescribe a course of vice as a propaedeutic to 
holiness. Moreover, the danger of evil deeds is that they will 
become habitual, so that their victim cannot break away but 
will be dragged down. Many who have lived longest and 
done most of the world's work were delicate when young; 
some whose youth was morally sickly have become doers of 



26o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the greatest and noblest deeds. But such instances really 
only teach that there is hope for those who start wrong — 
they are not examples to follow. When we reflect that 
consciousness itself is caused and measured by departure 
from the norm, we realize that the world has to do much 
hard thinking and investigation to rightly orient us in this 
great field of moral pedagogy, beset as it is with perils and 
difficulties both practical and theoretical. 

Companionship is a potent agent. Children, especially 
boys, need a great variety of associates near their own age, 
and without them they cannot live out completely each stage 
and develop all its possibilities. The studies of only children 
show how maimed and narrowed they are. They spindle up 
to maturity by short cuts, leaving many buds of possibility 
that do not blossom in their season but are prone to unfold 
later than they should; and this causes traits of infantilism 
like falsetto notes in the voice. The first meeting of toddling 
infants has often been described. There is intense self- 
consciousness, mingled shyness and eagerness for further ac- 
quaintance, giving or taking of toys, caresses, blows perhaps 
in turn according to temperament. Activity is very much 
sustained, perhaps causing sleeplessness and nervousness, 
which children who play only by themselves, and rarely with 
abandon or excess, do not suffer from. This give-and-take 
method by which children develop each other is broadening; 
and the education of the street has been found more effective 
than that of school up to seven years, according to the famous 
British census. Our boys need to know something of bad 
boys so as to discriminate between them and choose their 
friendships. Boys in lower school grades are often suddenly 
infected with the contagion of various disagreeable and even 
bad ways; but they overcome these contagions, one after 
another, and slowly acquire an immunity which needs just 
this experience to be effective. Here the timid moralist and 
the overfond parent are alike liable to err. Some exposure to 
evil is as necessary for moral weal as exposure to wind and 
weather is for physical health. Animal spirits must have their 
fling for they are the mettle to which growth will ultimately 
give the finest temper. Uniform goodness is often monoto- 
nous and wrongdoing is far more varied; but the best safe- 



MORAL EDUCATION 261 

guard for most of these ills is inoculation with attenuated 
virus. I do not forget the immense evil that one really bad 
boy can do in a whole neighborhood. I have records of new 
boys who have lowered the whole moral tone of their environ- 
ment for a time more than parents and teachers combined 
could raise it. 

The susceptibility of certain ages to vileness and the ease 
with which certain bad things are learned, which can never be 
entirely unlearned, is amazing. The w^orst of the evils here in 
mind is where small and innocent boys just before the physio- 
logical age are exposed to vile ones who have just passed it. 
The latter seem by a perfectly diabolical instinct passionately 
disposed to infect their juniors with the worst that is in them. 
Nevertheless, while we should reduce these dangers to a mini- 
mum, we must not eliminate boys from all association with 
those older than themselves. This is a very grave defect of our 
graded school system. In the old, ungraded days the boys 
heard recitations of higher classes and got much from them, 
and profited largely from associations with those older and 
younger. Now they are cut off from all these sources of moral 
and intellectual stimulation. 

Again, there is a time from six or eight to twelve when 
boys care almost nothing for grown ups, living out their own 
life ; but one of the most emphatic changes in the early teens 
is an often marked new interest in grown ups and in all the 
activities and ideals of maturity. Now children are exceed- 
ingly susceptible to their elders ; but all this is lost to-day for 
the schoolboy follows leaders of his own age who become 
bosses and he henchman; and thus the natural domination of 
maturer years is replaced by the gang instinct. The passion 
for meeting and just being together and having a good time, 
uncontrolled by adults, of merging one's individuality with 
that of others, is very strong and dominant near the beginning 
of the teens, and associations, if unfit, bring new standards of 
conduct and make parents and teachers suddenly realize that 
they are utterly helpless. Workers with boys can now do 
little but guide their companionships. In their huts and hunk- 
ies, the best fighter is usually the leader of the gang, which has 
a sense of ownership; but these organizations do cultivate 
loyalty so that treachery in " snitching " or " peaching " is 



262 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

very rare. Certainly a little work by boys is very much better 
than much work for them while these rather crude semisavage 
virtues are evolving which are the basis of social morality. 

Studies of the most popular boy show that the favorite 
traits their mates prefer are jollity, good temper, and exuber- 
ance of spirit. The leader must be brimful of fun, not easily 
mad, fair, just, fond of play; while health and scholarship are 
rarely mentioned. Some boys want two chums of opposite 
characteristics. A single friend or a number of the same type, 
which is the ideal of the Greek-letter college fraternities, is 
dwarfing. The passion for chums has become very strong as 
early as ten ; but the ideal chum is rarely of the same age, but 
either older, for protection, counsel, and inspiration, or else 
younger, to be bullied and to serve. The power of mere 
proximity diminishes with age, and affinity with conscious 
selection comes in later. Real friendships among boys will 
survive a great deal of quarreling and even abuse ; and 
methods for settling disputes are sometimes quite elaborate. 
Every boy certainly ought to have one or more friends that 
are complementary or opposites to himself in temper, disposi- 
tion, ideals, etc. Young children are democratic and make no 
class distinctions until these are suggested by adults. Some 
now think that rich and cultivated families should sometimes 
invite to their homes the children of the poor, in order that 
their own may associate with them. Children of rich parents 
who associate only with others of their own kind are peculiar- 
ly liable to suffer from proximity, artificiality, priggishness, to 
develop early affectations, and become indocile, unmannerly, 
irresponsible and disagreeable. All such children should have 
a circle of friends of a class very distinct from their own, and 
should visit their homes and entertain them. This of itself 
would tend toward not only new manners but a taste for 
simplicity as opposed to mere costliness, and finally for a love 
of the genuine in place of the artificial. 

Even imaginary companions often have moral significance. 
It is well known that many children, especially if much alone, 
instinctively seek to rescue themselves from the invincible 
stupidity that results from isolation by inventing personages 
that may come to be very real, with definite features, traits, and 
histories richly dight with circumstance, incident, and detail, 



MORAL EDUCATION 263 

and that these fancied friends may persist for years. They 
are played, slept, talked with, sit at table, though they are 
never seen, for they are of the stuff that dreams are made of. 
Some now hold that children should be encouraged to con- 
struct imaginary friends ; and all agree that, where they exist, 
the parents should help to shape their character, for this often 
exerts an important influence upon the real child beyond mere- 
ly stimulating its fancy. It is pathetic that the passion for 
mates is so strong that the child who lacks them has to pro- 
ceed to create them. 

Truancy. — The Chicago' Conference on Truancy in 1906 
was a great surprise. It had long been assumed that the schools 
were so good that it was perversity, if not depravity, on the 
part of children not to attend them. This our truant laws, 
officers, and schools assumed. But here speaker after speaker 
declared in substance that it was by no means proven that the 
normal child ought to go to school, or that it did not have a 
right to go wherever it liked, barring danger and vice. So- 
called truants often go where they learn far more than they 
could learn at school, which seems very arid, constrained, and 
dismal as compared with life outside. The educational value 
of the dump, garbage heap, docks, back alleys, swimming 
pool, hockey, marbles, and now the playgrounds, as successful 
rivals of the school for the boys' affections and interests, were 
dwelt upon. Lads with ginger in them who love a rumpus, 
who need to run wild a little, and whom proper people think 
depraved and lost, whom weak and unreasoning parents call 
wayward and incorrigible, at this conference received apprecia- 
tive, not to say sympathetic, consideration. Neglected children 
are not necessarily bad; and probation, jurisdiction of the 
court, and even custody should not brand the child with in- 
delible disgrace, for these are only forms of guardianship. 
Probably the whole boy never goes to school : at best a major- 
ity, and usually only a minority of his powers are represented 
there ; his zests, his imagination, his wishes are outside. Thus, 
he is more or less of a prisoner there, constrained against his 
will. What can the monotonous, stupid drill in the three R's 
offer that begins to compare in attractiveness to life? Is it the 
duty of all parents to send all children to the school as now 
constituted? I doubt it more and more. Compulsory educa- 



264 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tion never can be true education but will always ring hollow 
and false. 

As to responsibility ^ the very essence of a happy childhood 
is carelessness. It must be cared for. To be held accountable 
for too little, to be too much looked out for by others, to 
have all done for them, and little by them, to be shielded 
from the consequences of their errors and neglects — makes 
for selfishness and brings later the chronic discontent that 
lays too heavy demands on the environment and on life con- 
ditions, and too little on self; that seeks rights without 
paying their price in duties. Such children are liable to 
be exacting and querulous. In industrial positions they 
often fail because they cannot be made to feel their account- 
ability or their relations to the business, to others, to the 
whole. With possessions should always go responsibility 
for their care ; hence the need of ownership. Those who have 
nothing they can call their own are prone to lack responsibil- 
ity. Membership in an organization, even a gang, teaches co- 
operative obligations to it. In this, the isolated child is prone 
to be deficient. So, too, the child who has no home duties or 
too much help or service there, is lacking in this respect. The 
child, then, must feel that it owes something definite tO' each 
member of its family, playmates, teacher, school, as well as to 
the community. On the other hand, too much or too early 
responsibility is crushing, and robs childhood of its chief joy, 
namely — freedom from responsibility ; tends to bring maturity 
before its time, and may develop an oppressive sense of anxiety 
and worry that lays the basis for various repressive neuroses 
later. As in so many other departments of moral education, 
all here, too, depends upon individual adjustments. The same 
burden of accountability that would overwhelm some children 
is the crying need of others. Thus a moral survey of the life 
of each should be made the basis of personal prescription. 
Mass training is nowhere so perilous as in the ethical domain. 

Children should honor and respect their parents as the 
decalogue requires. They should do this just so far as their 
parents deserve it. But if the father never thought of their 

* See a good discussion by Kurt Steinitz. Der Verantwortlichkeitsgedanke im 
19. Jahrhundert. Zeitschrift fiir pad. Psy. und Pathologie, 1901, vol. 3, pp. 363- 
394. 



MORAL EDUCATION 265 

procreation and violated the best conditions for this office and 
sought only excessive indulgence for himself v^ith deteriorated 
or depleted vital fluids, if he was intoxicated, too old, infected, 
or exhausted, surely he is not to be revered for this defective 
physical paternity. Perhaps, rather, he is worthier of curses. 
The mother, too, perhaps did not enter upon her harder offices 
of maternity in a fit condition or with knowledge, or did so 
perhaps with reluctance or even aversion. In nursing, clothing, 
and caring for her infant she may have been driven only by a 
blind animal instinct or have performed these duties as a father 
who does the minimum that social decency or the law requires. 
If, instead of personal ministration by parents, children are 
turned over to others and less and less is done for them in the 
home, the debt of gratitude on them is less. Is it strange that 
under these conditions their respect for parents declines ? Are 
we worth}^ of the respect we demand of them? The same 
question may be addressed to mechanical hireling teachers. 
By what right do adults claim the reverence of the young, or 
what is their indebtedness to municipalities with scant or no 
playgrounds, that have provided no baths or swimming facili- 
ties, no parks, and only a minimum of indifferent schools, and 
Httle other provision for child welfare? What claims have 
they upon the local civic pride and loyalty of those reared 
under conditions they provide? The same applies to the 
nation that demands patriotism and perhaps the supreme 
sacrifice of life. Is our fatherland intrinsically the best and 
does it do most for its subjects? If authority is not based on 
virtue, the obedience of children is simply yielding to the will 
of the stronger because they are the weaker and not to superior 
wisdom or real moral ascendency, which should go with age. 
Recent and very significant studies show that children, at a 
certain stage of their development when they are most acutely 
conscious of the disparity between what they would be and do 
and what they can, are only too prone to wonder in their day 
dreams if their parents really did all their duty by them and 
perhaps to hold them co-responsible for their own shortcom- 
ings, just as at another stage when children's ideals are high- 
est and seem most realizable, they often wonder whether they 
are really the children of their parents and imagine that they 
have had a greater, perhaps unknown father. For very young 



266 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

children the parents are the supreme ideals ; but later they are 
weighed and compared with others and judged in the end more 
or less justly ; and while nothing can exceed the reverence and 
devotion the best parents merit, no execrations are too bitter 
for the worst, and the child's curse on its parents, if merited, 
is a fearful thing. 

Bravery. — France has taken much pains to cultivate cour- 
age among children, and there are societies for giving them 
decorations for meritorious deeds. At a recent conference 
Maurice Bloch ^ describes in a vivid way many of these acts 
of heroism, some of them by children of eight or ten years, 
and also speaks of the various prizes and decorations, public 
and private, given to boys and girls who have distinguished 
themselves by bravery. One who was a soldier at eleven wrote 
a letter to his father before an operation which ended in death 
that was a model of mingled heroism and affection. One part 
of a battalion during the revolution was composed of lads of 
from thirteen to fourteen. Several great generals are named 
who have been soldiers and under fire at ten and eleven. Not 
a few of the prizes for courage are given to those who save 
other children from drowning or from fire at great risk of 
their own lives. A few have fought mad dogs to save others. 
At least two of these, Pasteur honored. These children were 
not ignorant of danger like those of more tender age who have 
been known to rush across the street where carriages were 
thickest or even before a fire of mitrailleuse in search of a lost 
ball. The history of France back to the Crusades appears to 
abound in illustrations of juvenile heroism. Our age is too 
tender to sanction the action of a group of French boys who 
commemorated the execution of a comrade by the Prussians by 
visiting the scene of his death soon after and each taking a 
most solemn oath to die like him at any time their country 
needed their lives. Nor should we agree with a Russian writer 
who would have children of seven learn to descend on ropes 
from high roofs, ride horses, throw the lasso, scale high walls 
and buildings so that they might help effectively in time of 
fire, and get the discipline that comes from being accustomed 

' Le Courage chez I'Enfant; conference faite au Petit Palais, Exposition de 
I'enfance le 7 Juin, igor. Paris, Picard, 1901, 29 p. (Bibliotheque d'Instruction 
et d'Education du Citoyen.) 



MORAL EDUCATION 267 

to clanger. Patriotism is best taught by making little folk 
great by the lessons of heroism. 

The sense of justice is a product of slow evolution in the 
race and in the individual. It is based on sympathy and the 
power of putting yourself in another's place, or seeing our- 
selves as others see us. Plato thought it capable of becoming 
such a passion that the wise man fairly longed and lusted for 
punishment, if he had been guilty of any infraction of its laws, 
not so much because a penalty fitting the crime was necessary 
to bring home a realization of demerit, but because the scales 
of some more absolute or perhaps divine justice were out of 
poise and must be made true again. There is a deep sense in 
the race that sin must be expiated by suffering, and if it is not, 
that grave dangers impend not only to the transgressor but to 
the community. Justice is blindfolded because it is no respecter 
of persons. Criminology has always distinguished between 
mortal offenses punishable by death and less degrees of guilt. 
The psychology of the folk soul which has evolved transcen- 
dental rewards and penalties ^nd devised modes of atonement 
and expiation by vicarious sacrifices shows the sweep and 
grandeur of this potent group of ethical instincts and their 
corrective originality. It is the sense of justice in the soul that 
brings a feeling of impending wrath. It thus brings fear, 
and in ordeals and conflicts makes those who are guilty feeble 
and fallible, so that these superstitious tests of guilt or inno- 
cence are often very effective. How to escape the visitations 
of evil due to misconduct has often been a great and absorbing 
theme of thought with primitive man, and many forms of 
solution are seen in which various substitutes and vicarious 
victims have been brought forward. This is the root of the 
very idea of sacrifice. 

For the young child the law of justice should not be keyed 
too high. He must not be eternally under a sense of deserving 
evil, and retribution must be mild. Only at adolescence does 
he feel a sense slowly broaden and deepen toward absolute 
standards, until there is at least a glimpse of transcendental 
merits and demerits, as social and divine retaliation is sensed. 
The psychic roots of optimism and pessimism strike deep into 
the sense of justice. This is a moral world if good and evil 
alike get their deserts ; but because this does not always appear 



268 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

to be the case, heaven and hell are needed to bolster np the 
faith that this is a good world. Laws, tribunals, tragedy, 
novels, too, are ejffective in direct proportion as evil gets its 
deserts and good is rewarded. God would be dethroned if 
He did not bring this about. 

How, then, is this corner stone of the moral temple to be 
laid in the souls of the young? It begins in the sense of fair 
play with such rules of the game as insure victory to the 
best man or team. Thus cheap and unsportsmanlike tricks, 
secret advantages, directly undermine this bulwark of ethics. 
An environment so organized that each gets what he earns — 
no more, no less — whether in the way of respect or material 
advantage is the vital air in which this sentiment grows. All 
moral education is a probation system in which just this occurs 
promptly and pitilessly without fear or effort. The education 
of the sense of justice culminates in the sublime conviction 
that in this world nothing really evil or no failure can befall a 
truly good man; and conversely, that nothing that is really 
good, that no true success, can ever come to a bad one. 

Now, what really makes this a moral world in which this 
actually does occur? The chief factor in the process is the be- 
lief that it is so. If we are firmly convinced that honesty and 
virtue pay in the end and that vice and crime fail, they will do 
so. The contestant in a bad cause is only half-hearted and he 
who fights in a good one feels that he has the moral cosmos 
at his back and so, though he be weak, triumphs. A bad con- 
science indeed makes cowards and weaklings. Thus there is 
no moral progress unless we have faith that the eternal powers 
are on the side of right. Thus I believe there is nothing that is 
teachable in morals quite so important as that there is a power 
that makes for righteousness and against unrighteousness at 
the helm of the universe, and that, although wrongdoing may 
flourish for a season, sooner or later, in some way or other, it 
meets its deserts. If all men steadfastly believed that all sins 
would always be found out or meet their condign rewards, it 
would always be so in fact, for the vile would either confess or 
make reparation, the villain would find the furies unchained in 
his soul. The man who knows his cause to be unjust, fights in 
its defense with dull weapons and feeble muscles compared 
with him who is thrice armed because his quarrel is just. 



MORAL EDUCATION 269 

Justice is thus the muse of positive moral education. All 
umpires, school juries, students, and committees on govern- 
ment should supremely respect it. By executing righteous 
vengeance upon others, we learn a wholesome fear that, if we 
are prompted to injustice, we shall expose ourselves to the 
same vengeance. There is a limit to asking and accepting 
pardon for offenses ; and is it manly or womanly to let another, 
though it be a superior or divine friend, bear the consequences 
of our sin, while we go scot free ? Is this psychologically pos- 
sible or morally permissible? Is it not rather degenerative in 
its effects upon the moral sense? It is here that theology not 
Christ, the Commentators, but not the Bible, in evolving the 
theory of the vicarious atonement have wrought incalculable 
harm to the moral sense; and it is here that a great work of 
clearing up and restoration needs to be done. If I may sin 
with impunity because a voluntary burden bearer is always at 
hand eager to take the consequences of my sin, then I may sin 
again with impunity. It is no less cowardly and dishonorable 
in me to let him be the victim of my sin than if he were a 
weaker brother. Impunity is perilously akin to indulgence. 
Absolution can only abate ingrained effects of sin and this is 
much. But to transfer pains and penalties from the penitent 
to Christ is effective precisely in the same way that conjuring 
diseases into an animal, plant or charmed amulet is. The 
theory of such transference is true only in so far as it works 
well ; and the principle is the same as that of cures by a rabbit's 
foot. 

Thus the pedagogy of justice and responsibility is muddled, 
and moral endeavors are made of no avail by the prevalence of 
such views. The very basis of moral inculcation is that, if we 
sin, we suffer in our own person and pain helps us to right 
ourselves again. Had the dear, heavenly Father ever really 
provided any such scheme, or really offered Himself as a scape- 
goat for man's iniquities, He would have done even worse than 
overfond parents who spoil their children, by providing 
immunities. He would have sold us indulgence for sin and at 
very cheap rates. Years of error are atoned for by a prayer 
or a single act of faith. This is not in the nature of a moral 
world, but perverts it. This doctrine is the unpardonable sin 
of the church against both true religion and morals. The only 



270 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

justification for it is found in the fact that human nature is so 
richly endowed and so resourceful that it can right itself after 
a surprisingly prolonged course of error and even dissipation 
by means of the residual vital energy that remains in it ; and 
not only the race but individuals often need to be reminded 
that the momentum of evolution is great, manifold, and not 
easily exhausted. 

Teaching Morals in the Topics of the Curriculum. — To 
insist that every lesson in every subject should be primarily a 
lesson in morals does not imply any undue subordination of 
the subject matter of the different branches but only a larger 
and deeper appreciation of the facts taught. It gives them a 
higher value. Thus wherever a pupil is made to feel a deeper 
interest, to abandon indifference and idleness, and to put more 
energy into any subject, he is by that very fact made morally 
better. History is ethics teaching by example. Its great char- 
acters and achievements fire the aspirations of boys in every 
hero-worshiping age. Its widened horizon tends to shame 
littleness, teaches to tell the truth and how difficult this is to do, 
impresses toleration, rebukes undue partisanship. History is 
the great judge and vindicator of the ways of God to man. So 
literature is constantly becoming, at least indirectly, a series 
of lessons in right conduct, sentiments and ideas. Nature 
study teaches to think independently and exactly, gives sym- 
pathy with plants and animals, interests in the general laws of 
life and heredity, cultivates judgment and critical discrimina- 
tion, and gives a deeper sense of all-pervading law. Domestic 
arts enhance the sense of responsibility for all that pertains to 
family management, and magnifies woman's sense of her own 
function in the world and shows her how to be more effective 
and escape drudgery and ill health. 

Industrial training part of the day has in several authentic 
cases actually increased the rate of intellectual progress of 
school children, despite the lessened time devoted to studies. 
We have now much literature upon this subject and very few 
cases show a retardation of time spent on studies. From six or 
seven to fourteen or fifteen is the nascent period for acquiring 
manual dexterity and skill, and if this is neglected during its 
season it can rarely or never be made up later. Pride and 
interest in achievement and in products of earnest, honest toil 



MORAL EDUCATION 271 

are potent factors in character building. Hence added to the 
economic and vocational, a moral value is also more and more 
apparent in industrial education. Thrift rightly taught has a 
moral as well as a social value not yet sufficiently recognized. 
Boys who are taught what to do with their earnings, to keep 
accounts, to feel the difference between surplus and deficit, 
and what solvency and credit mean, who have a little savings 
in a bank or elsewhere, feel augmented self-respect, widened 
msntal interests, more responsibility, foresight and power of 
self-denial. Thus money, ownership, possessions, the psy- 
chology of which is now being developed, are seen to have very 
high promise and potency of ethical development in them. 
The sense of having really earned money by actual services 
rendered gives a wholesome sense of worth and of member- 
ship in a great economic system which dominates modern life. 
I would have the contents of every reader in the grades 
and all the English literature studied in the high school 
chosen primarily with reference to moral values and, ignoring 
here the dangerous principle of art for art's sake, place all 
stylistic qualities second to ethical values. In view of the woe- 
ful and growing ignorance of Scripture, I would have Bible 
stories and selections from both Testaments taught as litera- 
ture, because the alternative — this or ignorance of the Bible — 
is pressed upon us as more and more imperative. The masterly 
Saxon directness, simplicity, and virility of the English Bible 
is the best pattern on which to fashion style, and its moral 
uplift is independent of all supernal elements. So, too, I 
would lay the other great ethnic Bibles under contribution, with 
selections primarily for moral ends from the literature of 
Confucianism, Brahminism, Buddhism, Mohammedism, with 
illustrations of the Greek and Roman and Scandinavian re- 
ligions at their best, which in fact are to-day even much better 
known by high-school graduates than the Bible. These, it 
must be frankly said, contain some elements of real value to 
youth which our Scripture lacks, for even it cannot do every- 
thing and needs to be supplemented. Thirdly, I would have 
all English literature and history also made the basis of a 
careful, well-planned, cooperative, moral survey that should 
select the best elements, epitomized, condensed, and adjusted 
to childhood, by the story-telling and " give-back " methods 



272 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

up the grades described elsewhere. There is material enough 
in English, and translated into it, to make a secular Bible of 
the type Mr. Heather Bigg had in mind, of immense moral 
power. These things — all the way from the old animal fable 
up to the loftiest achievements of the sublimest men, together 
with proverbs, a few well-chosen hymns, and poems of virtue 
properly grouped in a chrestomathy — should constitute the 
essential factor in English in place of the wretched word- 
cramming analysis of texts which focuses attention on form 
rather than on content, which has brought instruction in this 
field to its present condition of decadence. 

Again, the various vocational^ industrial and reformatory 
schools, houses of detention, homes, and other institutions pro- 
vided for boys who loath and hate the school, as a whole, fit 
their nature and needs better than the public school does those 
who frequent it. Far more wisdom and intelligence have been 
expended in providing for these exceptional children (as well 
as idiots and sense defectives) in the last few decades than in 
conducting the public schools. It is for those not fitted or 
loyal to the latter that pedagogic genius has done perhaps its 
very best work. The tame, docile children have the rutty, 
hack, conventional teachers who dread innovation, huddle 
together for strength and clamor for uniformity of system, 
and become adepts in suppressing all roystering and escapade- 
loving supervital human cubs into dull, cowed, commonplace, 
henpecked conformity, in whom the possibility of originality 
in thought and deed is smothered. Instead of being kept 
young by the children in their charge, as good parents are, 
these teachers grow old early because of chronic anxiety lest 
something vital and interesting should happen in their school- 
rooms. They cannot and dare not be original save in 
petty variations. Teachers of exceptional children, on the 
other hand, have every provocation for the higher degrees 
of pedagogic originality, and they have risen to their op- 
portunity. It is precisely the best of the institutions pro- 
vided for boys whom the stock pedagogue deems dull, bad, 
or both that are setting the fashion for the education of the 
future, where work that will pay alternates with study and 
play, and where social organizations, self-government, and 
strict moral regimen are wisely combined. The education 



MORAL EDUCATION 273 

provided for the strong-willed, headstrong, exceptional, active 
boys with some of the red blood of savagery still coursing in 
their veins, as in the George Junior Republic, Boys' Clubs, and 
various institutions under the care of the courts, is to-day 
often nearer to the real nature of boyhood than anything that 
has yet been provided for the turbulent transformation stage 
of life. More than that, it is this education that really fits the 
natural, as opposed to the stall-fed, exhibition, model boys that 
so many parents prefer and teachers wish to turn out, that is 
setting the fashion for the education of the future. 

Physical training, that is, gymnastic exercises with and 
without apparatus, finds its stimulus from within as contrasted 
with games and athletics which find their motives without. 
The former has behind it the culture motive to develop and be 
strong; the motive of the latter is to excel others. As an arti- 
ficial substitute for work, it becomes needful somewhat in pro- 
portion as city and sedentary life increases. As boys become 
interested in their biceps they grow trusty and are more likely 
to be temperate, to accept discipline, to be more interested in 
wholesome regime. As muscles develop, the gap between 
knowing and doing narrows and motor mindedness increases. 
There also arises a salutary sense of the difference between 
tolerable wellness, or mere absence of sickness, and an exuber- 
ant buoyant feeling of abounding vitality, health, and vigor 
which brings courage, hope, and right ambition in its train, 
power to undergo -hardship, do difficult things, bear trials, and 
resist temptation, while flabby muscles and deficiency of exer- 
cise give a sense of weakness, lust for indulgence, easy dis- 
couragement, and feelings of inefficiency.^ 

Habits and Morals. — We do not begin to utilize the culture 
of health as the basis of morals as we should do, because 
we do not realize that their relation is so intimate as at 
many points to be entirely identical. Body-keeping with the 
young can and should be made almost a religion ; and most of 
the worst sins and errors of youth are in no way more effect- 
ively forefended than by high ideals and a vigorous cult of 
personal and social hygiene. Indeed, Plato thought he could 

' On the three last topics, see some excellent suggestions in Stuart H. Rowe's 
Habit-formation and the Science of Teaching. New York, Longmans, Green & 
Co., 1909, 308 p. 
19 



274 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

not teach an invalid morals because, if he had not learned the 
art of body-keeping, still less could he discipline his soul. 
Pindar traced the pedigree of the Olympic victors back to the 
immortal gods; cities gave them their highest honors; they 
shaped the canons of Greek art; their goal was physical per- 
fection of form and of function, to live in a body which could 
do everything mechanical possible for it to accomplish without 
break or strain. Through orchestration and dancing, physical 
culture became the art of the muses. Appetite was a bodily 
conscience like the Socratic demon, deteriorating from im- 
proper viands or too much, with a voice still and small as that 
of the Holy Ghost, although like it often sinned against and 
grieved away. Normally it should point straight to the pole 
of perfect health. Holiness and health are the same word ; and 
they suggest, too, liberal, all-sided culture. Hygiene and re- 
ligion have always been related even when both were most 
perverted. Hard as the saying is, either we or our parents 
have sinned if we are not in youth healthful. Most of us 
can be well, if we wish it intensely, passionately, and wisely 
enough, for nowhere is nurture more effective in mending the 
flaws of nature than in health. Just ordinary, mucker wellness 
in answer to the universal question : How do you do ? — is not 
enough ; but we should live near the top notch of our con- 
dition, which is the supreme art of life, for on such physiolog- 
ical altitudes most of the success and greatest achievements of 
men have been wrought. To be sure, there have been sickly 
geniuses or men of talent who have overdrawn their vitality ; 
but the real raw, psychic stuff, the protoplasm out of which 
nearly every form of greatness and success is made, is the 
superfluous vigor given by an extra good stomach, heart, 
lungs, strong nerves, and muscles. This appears in childhood 
as animal spirits, the rapture of being alive, which is the great- 
est joy on earth. It gives Gemiith, esprit, euphoria, makes 
men mettlesome, nobly ambitious of the highest good, beauty, 
and truth which the gods, without envy, permit to man's 
estate. It makes the feelings in which we live, move, and have 
our being not only vital but virtuous. Only he who is well, 
strong, can face the world with dauntless courage and reso- 
lution to do or suffer, will not collapse under the sudden 
strains so liable to-day, or decline into the easy life or perhaps 



MORAL EDUCATION 275 

to a refined invalidism and be ready for Osier's chloroform 
or Carnegie's pension in the forties or fifties. How we are 
drawn, like those who trek through arid deserts to a spring, 
by those hearty men and women who overflow with spon- 
taneous good spirits, good will, and good cheer for which the 
soul pants and of which our nerves are often so scant! All 
these things are the direct products of abounding health, 

I have begun a course of ethics with lower college classes 
and for two or three months have given nothing but hygiene; 
and I believe the pedagogic possibilities of this mode of intro- 
duction into this great domain are at present unsuspected and 
that, instead of the arid, speculative, casuistic way, not only 
college but high-school boys could be infected with the real love 
of virtue and a deep aversion to every sin against the body. 
Sin is sickness and virtue is health of body as well as of soul. 
Hence plain talks on sleep, toilet, food, dress, exercise, recre- 
ation, regularity, sex regimen and heredity, training, interest 
in periodic weighing and measuring, with a good deal of dis- 
cussion about diet and nutrition — these, I believe, should be 
the basis of the moral teaching of the young. The world saw 
in Greece, and again in the days of Jahn a physical Renais- 
sance ; and perhaps we may now be entering a third. The first 
two preceded the most brilliant periods in the intellectual his- 
tory of mankind. Some tell us this has been the case in Japan 
and likewise in Germany ; since the Turner societies, the 
stature of soldiers has been increased and a new sense of loy- 
alty and heartiness, which is the best basis of purity, patience, 
courage, and fraternity, has been established. The playground 
movement is now rapidly extending over the whole world; 
cities are lavishing large sums and widening acreages devoted 
to play. The Pope lately witnessed the contests of the athletic 
societies of Italy, became their patron and conferred 250 gold 
and silver medals from a temporary throne erected in the 
garden of the Vatican. School hygiene has become an inter- 
national movement and has had several congresses. Even in 
China an imperial decree has forbidden opium and foot- 
binding. 

The Sophistication of Conscience. — Knowledge has little or 
no intrinsic value in and of itself ; that it has is the superstition 
of rationalism, and is just as misleading on one side as the 



276 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

merely commercial view of knowledge is on the other. Like 
light, knowledge is good not to see but to see by. Careful 
psychic analysis shows that love of knowledge for its own 
pure sake is probably an impossibility ; and when we speak of 
this, we are really concerned with the effects of knowledge 
upon character, which is its supreme value. It cannot exist 
without modifying character and conduct; and its worth 
is measured by its efficacy in doing this aright. Especially 
humanistic culture must ripen into ethical potency. Hegel de- 
fined pedagogy as the art of rrtaking men moral. Ignorance is 
doubtless better than knowledge that does not make us better ; 
and there is a purely intellectual culture that is disastrous to 
virtue. Most of all is this especially the case in the field of 
the practical will, where to drag instinct before the bar of 
reason emasculates it, as illustrated in the following homely 
incident : 

Years ago, a rich lady, member of Henry Ward Beecher's 
church, fell from a Brooklyn ferry-boat near the dock and was 
saved by a rough old English sailor, who plunged in and res- 
cued her by clinging to a floating ice cake. So they had a 
reception for him in the church vestry, to which he was very 
reluctantly brought, where he was entertained, flattered, and 
almost dragged to the platform where Beecher described his 
heroic act with an eloquence that thrilled all present, gave him 
a purse, and pinned a medal to his jacket. " Tell us just how 
you did it," Beecher said ; and the cry was volleyed back from 
the audience. The sailor, writhing and sweating with embar- 
rassment staggered to his feet and said : " There ain't much to 
tell ; the boat give a lurch ; she pitched in ; and I was standin' 
nearest and jumped in after her, just as anybody would do. I 
only done my duty. I ain't a hero and if I'd known you'd 
a'thought a common tar like me was trying to do a big thing 

and would a'made all this fuss about it, I'd a'let the old 

woman drown. I wisht I had. I'll never do such a thing 
again, so drop it and let me go, for I've got to have a drink." 
And he bolted for the door. Next morning he was in the 
police court for drunkenness and disorder. His money and 
medal were gone and fame knew him no more. 

In this case a sudden crisis was sprung ; the deed was done. 
Like many of the best samples of great heroism in the French 



MORAL EDUCATION 277 

collection, the splendid act was impulsive and unreasoning; 
there was no weighing of motives with a deliberative choice, 
for perfect virtue knows nothing of conscience or of temptation. 
There is just a healthy instinct pointing always, like the com- 
pass toward the pole, toward the highest good of the individual 
and the race. If we always did right, we should no more 
know we had a conscience than the well man knows he has 
a stomach, heart, or nerves. To be conscious of conscience 
means that evil has found entrance and that, if we do right we 
do so only with a majority of our faculties and not unanimously 
with them all. Very much good is done in this way, to be 
sure, but it is not virtue of the purest order but of secondary 
quality. Virginal purity never debates or parleys, for to delib- 
erate is often to be lost ; but the teachable morality of the text- 
books in ethics is of a lower order than that which is intuitive 
and automatic. The world needs it badly enough, to be sure, 
but it is nevertheless essentially remedial ; it is not primordial 
innocence but moral convalescence. Hence it is not better to 
have sinned and be saved than never to have sinned at all. 
The old sailor felt in the depths of his soul that to be made con- 
scious of his good deed brought deterioration of its quality. If 
the best of us have sinned, every one of the worst of us has, 
like him, some trait of this pristine, unfallen, spontaneous 
goodness. Thus the deepest moral instinct at its best impels 
men to do the right, and often the ideal, thing. Happily there 
is much of this aboriginal goodness in the world and strains of 
it are braided and veined through very bad lives ; but probably 
in every soul there is something, and in most souls much, that 
no stain of depravity has ever touched. 

But, having once sinned and suffered because our moral 
instinct was not clear and strong enough to keep us right, 
instead of acting like the child who may touch fire and the 
chick that may peck at its excrement once but never needs to 
do so twice to learn the lesson, we let conscience brood, reflect, 
and worst of all regret, and so keep resolutions for reform 
playing over the surface of the soul instead of letting the 
lessons of experience sink to the subconscious springs of future 
action. This is merely invalidism, often interesting, pathetic, 
perhaps tragic in its issue ; but it does not lead to righteousness 
but to the contorted scrupulosity of the New England con- 



27S EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

science. It opens wide the doors of casuistry. It is moral 
Fletcherism with excessive mastication of motives, ruminations 
of the past and general fussiness about results and details as 
conscience grows more and more freaky and neurasthenic. 
Intellectualizing moral sanctions thus dilutes will power and 
diverts the intellect from its essential function of making the 
great and essential distinction between right and wrong, the 
primal intuitions concerning which are deeply ingrained in 
every soul. 

Text-book work, classroom discussions, and much intro- 
spection cause youth to lose perspective and orientation. Thus 
the moral sense is sickly, distraught, and freaky. It is deca- 
dence and degeneration for the young to fall into the habit of 
talking or thinking rather than personally acting and resolving 
where any and every moral question is involved. A tingling, 
itching, or sore conscience is thus a danger sign for the young. 
Only the completely matured man can guide his conduct by 
the (^CKocro^ia ^iov Kv^epv^rrj'i, the motto of the Phi Beta 
Kappa, philosophy the guide of life. 

Honor. — For these reasons I would now build upon an- 
other principle in moral teaching alongside that of conscience : 
viz., honor. The basis of this is found in all. What insult 
will make the most effeminate, flabby, cowardly schoolboy or 
gamin fight, or the boldest and most unabashed girl blush, 
weep, and hate, like the imputation of dishonor? At the lie 
direct or a slur at his mother, the vilest wretch will defy the 
heaviest odds. When honor is gone, the Japanese knight, 
trained in the chivalrous code of Bushido, seeks death by 
hari-kiri ; and who would not defy it in defending a lady, 
even against one from whom he would personally flee. The 
Pauline charity is a tamer thing, but it has no more manifold 
and inspiring catalogue of predicates for the Christian than 
honor has for the gentleman born and bred. Honor, like con- 
science, is often very capricious, perverted, fantastic; and it 
may be only a crabbed, shriveled remnant as studied in its his- 
tory or in contemporary instances. It is found among thieves, 
prostitutes, beggars, and is sought in badges, degrees, and titles 
of nobility that schools, colleges, societies, and kings bestow. 
We have seen how the French utilize this principle. The Paris 
preacher, Wagner, says its function is to the unborn, to teach 



MORAL EDUCATION 279 

a life that is pure and dominated by the interests of posterity, 
Chesterfield said that a high sense of it is the distinctive trait 
of a true gentleman. Gizycki deems it ideal conduct in every 
relation of life. Here again we must turn to the Greeks. It 
has been described in Aristotle's magnanimous man, dignified 
in mien, slow of speech and movement, unerring in moral 
judgments, and in conflicts always finding the higher way; 
also in the imperturbable Stoic sage, who, the neo-Socratic 
school in Belgium say, could be completely happy in poverty, if 
all men thought him mean, if burning at the stake or in hell 
itself, if he had only the mens sibi conscia recti, but who with- 
out it would, like the tyrant, feel mean and wretched within 
though all men praised him and lavished upon him their tokens 
of respect ; Kant's august sense of obligation from within that 
filled his soul with the same awe as did the starry heavens and 
which made him fear not only that pleasure and pain, but even 
future rewards and punishments would corrupt it with selfish- 
ness; Nietzsche's superman, Zarathushtra, who despised all 
who were not superior; the born nobleman of nature who 
cannot pity those whom selection ought to exterminate, who 
despises all dignity and eminence not based on genuine, in- 
trinsic merit, is marked in all he says and does by inherited 
distinction and his friendship where he bestows it is an 
honorary degree. Ask yourself candidly as you look about 
at life and man if any moral motive, or any religion, or even 
love can to-day supply a stronger motive in the old and espe- 
cially in the young than an appeal to honor, even though it 
be undeveloped and distorted. Indeed, is he a true man who 
would not on the instant face the king of terrors in any form 
to save his honor, and is not the highest thing to live for that 
which we would die for on occasion? What a paltry life is 
left for all of us if it is gone! You say it is a military and 
pagan virtue, and so it is; but there is also now a virile Chris- 
tianity that is soldierly, and Jesus Himself was at no point less 
than a gentleman, but rather all that and vastly more. In 
every emergency to ask what is the ideal course to pursue, the 
highest, purest and most disinterested motive to act from, the 
loftiest and not the most expedient solution, choosing to be 
refuted by merely specious arguments rather than to use them 
and win out — this is honor ; but to succeed by trick or subter- 



28o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

fuge, to do right because it would be embarrassing to be found 
out wrong, to give or take secret rebates, to adulterate, to 
consent to corporate practices that as individuals we should 
shrink from, to be silent when we see imposition and outrage 
which exposure would put to flight — is not this always and 
everywhere rank dishonor ? To own a dollar not honestly won 
and that does not represent a real service — is this honor? 
Honor's own true knight keeps a personal conscience that 
party allegiance or popular clamor cannot silence. His maxim 
is not the craven one — make no enemies whatever befalls — but, 
make the enemies of truth, right and common justice be- 
tween man and man in your community your own enemies. 
Two years ago the English tennis champion was nearing the 
end of the third rubber game. Both were exactly even when 
the American made a fluke which would have lost him the 
international championship, but the Englishman deliberately 
made exactly the same fluke because he did not count it honor- 
able to win on an accident. This was true sportsmanship, the 
very heart and soul of our country's need. Collegians need it 
on the diamond, gridiron, and track; how we now need it in 
business, trade, politics! If that were the spirit, instead of 
winning at any price, I wonder if we might not almost sanction 
racing, pugilism, and even duelling if they only were schools 
of honor, pure and undefiled, instead of dishonor. 

The noblest of all its functions is to regulate love, for 
posterity and all the issues of the future of the world are com- 
mitted to the honor of young men. True honor cannot pos- 
sibly sneak, cheat, or lie. The life it makes us lead is single, 
not double. It knows nothing of two standards, one for 
Sunday and one for the shop, factory, or stock market; one 
for men and another for women. It keeps the spirit and not 
merely the letter of the medical, legal, club, student, and other 
professional codes of ethics, for it is simply ideal conduct in 
every rank and walk of life. It is moral idealism ; it is to the 
inner, all that manners and style, which are so much in them- 
selves, are to the outer, life ; it is the best bond and boon of 
friendship — another too-forgotten pagan virtue — which in its 
classical sense of Aristotle and Cicero can live again in the 
modern world only in its atmosphere. Let us rescue it from 
its perversions, reinterpret it in the larger light of evolution as 



MORAL EDUCATION 281 

having for the conduct in the future perhaps something of the 
same promise and potency that the stupendous word " faith " 
had for Paul, " justification " for Luther, " conscience " for 
the ethics of the eighteenth-century morahst. The mediaeval 
courts of love and the lofty ideals of Arthur, Gawain, Launce- 
lot, and they of the Round Table, and the Grail, conceived 
and idealized it as living as if noble ladies were looking on at 
every act, but for its knights to-day it is the whole inner voca- 
tion of man. Perhaps its destiny is to preside over and be 
loyal to the future of our race, to keep love high, true, and 
wedded to religion as it always should be, for only each can 
keep the other pure. To the honor of us to-day is committed 
the interests of all who come after us. Thus, may we not 
conclude that true honor should be the native breath and vital 
air of the true man who is also a true gentleman? This, I 
believe, is the basis of the ethics of the future for young men, 
and especially for collegians whose ideals are, or should be, 
the best basis from which to prophecy the future. 

Albert Ungard ^ gives fifty-three German words made 
from or compounded with the word Ehre — honor, and -perhaps 
many more definitions and descriptions of it by literary men, 
philosophers, soldiers, etc. These show very great diversity in 
its conception. It is as indefinable as good taste, tact, common 
sense, glory or Gemilth. All men and women claim it. It does 
not coincide with conscience. It involves some sense of worth, 
dignity, self-respect, and it also demands a certain respect 
from others, for it claims recognition. It usually involves 
courage and is perhaps the thing that those who have would 
more readily die for than forfeit. It has knightly pride and is 
often associated with rank or position. It involves ideals of 
conduct, and has been defined as the summum bonum of char- 
acter. It is the religion of spirited old and especially young 
men who have wrought out codes, often very elaborate, defin- 
ing how honor is won, protected, impugned, stained, lost, re- 
gained, and sometimes codifying insults of various kinds and 
degrees of mitigation or gravity, apologies, reparations, and as 
a last resort, duels in manifold forms. A recent duelling code 
of a German corps gives sixty-three points on which one may 

* Ehre und Ehrenschutz. Vienna, Hartleben, 1908, 134 p. 



282 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

be declared dishonorable and have to seek satisfaction on the 
Mensur. Honor may be ideal, or perverse, touchy and quar- 
relsome, and is often most challenging when least genuine. 
In the very active discussion now for some time going on in 
Germany, one side is well set forth by, for instance, Professor 
Binding, also by Meyer, the Austrian prince Alfonso in Bour- 
bon, and many others, who urge that real inner worth cannot 
be insulted, but only the claim to it can be. It is essentially 
immaculate although the respect due to it may be impaired. 
Some urge that none but himself can soil a man's honor. It is 
invulnerable, and those who think themselves liable to lose it 
are those who possess it least securely and subject themselves 
to needless and often very acute anxiety. In the belief that 
honor can really be impaired by others lies great danger to 
peace of mind, to social tranquillity, and to justice. To this 
it is answered that one's good name or repute may be filched 
and leave one poor indeed even though the mens sibi conscia 
recti still remains. Who is so strong that his self-respect is 
not affected, if that of others for him is lost, and what more 
keen moral anguish can be conceived than to be despised by 
those whose reverence we most desire ? One may live a noble 
life and win the highest repute among his fellow men seeking 
as the dearest thing on earth to merit their good opinion of 
him, and all this the slanderer may destroy and that so subtly 
that the law, always clumsy in such matters, provides no re- 
dress. Surely, too, the honor of a lady may be besmirched 
and her peace of mind thereby wrecked. The real infamy of a 
blow is not in the physical but in the psychic pain it causes. 
But is this not sufficiently punished by a counter-blow? Law 
courts, it is said, always underestimate honor. 

Professor Lammasch, of the University of Vienna, pro- 
poses to modify existing laws, and to provide a special court 
to protect honor. Except in rare cases, he would obviate fines, 
but have arrest and confinement in a specially provided and 
not too unattractive prison, and open all such transactions to 
publicity and the press. Existing codes have dealt very crude- 
ly with such affairs. But why not courts of review to obviate 
duels? In Austria, too, a new honor codex by Barbasetti, a 
fencing master, with 239 paragraphs, which regulates duels 
and which many noblemen and, it is said, even the emperor 



MORAL EDUCATION 283 

revised, has lately appeared. The criminal law in that land 
punished duelling with imprisonment from six months to 
twenty years, but this code declares it " a legitimate, logical 
result of high character formation," " one of the noblest ex- 
pressions of the human soul." Thus, what one code calls 
gentlemanly, the other makes criminal. An anti-duel league 
(1902) seeks only to reduce mortal combat to cases of very 
grave insult. Oethalom urges that the duel is sometimes a 
psychic necessity and that until complex and special laws regu- 
late it, it will persist, despite all opposition. He gives an 
account of many notable duels which at least show how in- 
tricate a matter it is, especially among soldiers. He pleads that 
this is better than shooting down in cold blood, duels in the 
dark with dirks, or duels where the one who draws the black 
ball commits suicide, which he says are characteristic of 
America. Duelling has always existed and, therefore, is neces- 
sary — is the argument. It protects the honor of women. The 
impulse to avenge an outrage is simply irresistible. Seduc- 
tion under promise of marriage, or of wives and daughters, 
is better punished in this way than in the open courts where 
a disgrace is given the greatest publicity and the press gloats 
over every detail so that the disgrace of the woman is maxi- 
mized, while there is always the possibility of no conviction. 
As long as honor is dearer than life, occasionally emergencies 
will arise where some form of duelling, if no more than with 
the vulgar one of the fists, is resorted to. One reason why the 
duel appeals to a certain type of mind is because it is a re- 
crudescence of a very ancient stage of life where the bully, or 
possibly where a strong bad man may rise above right and 
wrong and do his own will in his own way, trusting to his 
superior skill with weapons. This is more liable when duelling 
is chiefly with swords than when the weapon is the pistol. The 
first step toward reform is certainly to define honor, and this 
we are as yet far from able to do. The very fact that the 
conceptions of it differ so widely shows how difficult this task 
will be. 

K. Bodenstein ^ tells us that honor is a high ideal good 



* Das Ehrgefiihl der Kinder. Langensalza, Beyer, 1899, 47 p. (Pad. Mag. 
Heft 133.) 



284 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

which our materialistic age is too careless of. Everyone de- 
sires to be respected and valued by those about him. Popu- 
larity for ambition, good name and reputation, all are related. 
To serve one's age has often involved strange forms of honor, 
like the duel. Self-respect for one's own personality and re- 
sentment at any insult to it are social self- feeling. The judg- 
ment of youth is very fluctuating but is very potent upon 
children in the group. The teacher must judge very carefully 
in awarding praise and blame. Only Campe, influenced by 
Rousseau, would exclude the instinct of honor from the field 
of education, but most — Niemeyer, Pestalozzi, Herbart, Stoy, 
Ziller, etc. — would utilize it. Ehrgefuhl is very different from 
Ehrgeis. Schiller, in his " Criminal from Lost Honor," shows 
how disaster follows one who abandons regard for the good 
opinion of others about him. Vox populi, vox dei, suggests 
the norm. The Jesuits overdid appeals to emulation and 
rivalry. Marks, grading, and prizes may be overdone. Some 
think all premiums, diplomas, rank, and merit tables breed 
conceit, overtension and lust for publicity, and would even con- 
demn public declamations and recitations. Daily place taking 
is bad. Fools' caps and seats of disgrace, severe scolding, 
especially contempt, injure honor, and very likely class heroes 
will be developed. Shutting up is dangerous. Legal responsi- 
bility, which begins at twelve, may be well used. Children 
should not be shamed nor their bodies exposed, and flog- 
ging should never be in public. Even to cry shame is ques- 
tionable. It is well to let children see that the teacher tries to 
shield them from shame. Children's faults and virtues should 
not be talked about before them. Recognition, even by a word 
or a glance, is a great power, even for those who are obtuse. 
Honor merges into ever larger and larger circles, until finally 
it becomes patriotism. 

Mastery and Specialization. — Alongside the cult of per- 
sonal health and that of honor, I believe a third duty to self is 
capable of being extremely effective for morals with maturing 
young men of parts — and that is the duty to be master of 
something. I believe with all my heart in general culture. 
The average American probably has more general knowledge 
than the citizen of any other land past or present. He reads 
more newspapers and monthlies, has and uses more libraries 



MORAL EDUCATION 285 

and colleges per capita; is more interested in other people's 
business; keeps studying longer on in life, as witness our 
summer, evening, and especially our immense correspondence 
courses and institutions; shifts more readily from one business 
or occupation to another ; is always scanning the horizon for 
openings ; listens more readily to promoters and puts his scanty 
savings into more get-rich-quick schemes ; he moves oftener, 
travels^more, and more than anyone else in the world has ever 
done has an eye out for the main chance. But when it comes 
to knowing and doing one thing well to the point of mastery 
we touch our national weakness. In the expert work of bank- 
ing, in technical processes, both chemical and mechanical, in the 
fine crucial and determining points of trade and commerce, 
and the expert function generally, England has notoriously 
fallen into the hands of those born abroad. These things are 
now carried on in Germany. In not a few lines of business, art, 
and manufacture, we, too, have, though to less extent, fallen 
into the hands of alien experts, if we have them at all. This 
would have been far less the case here were our high pro- 
tective tariffs, which too often shelter slovenly and behind- 
hand methods of production, abolished, so that competition 
were world-wide and the fittest only could survive. The tariff 
walls are profitable because our home markets are so vast, but 
they shelter ignorance, lack of mastery of industrial processes 
and are thus indirectly harmful to all technical and higher 
scientific education. Germany, for instance, a few years ago 
was making a profit of one hundred and ten million dollars per 
year for her chemical industries alone because she led the world 
in this line of research, some great concerns employing more 
than a score of university trained men in constant investigation 
upon new ways of cheapening cost, bettering products, and 
utilizing waste. Were our tariffs down, then American chem- 
ical industries and processes could only compete by rivaling in 
the quality of the training we give experts ; but it is far easier 
to raise the tariff still higher than to raise the level of chemical 
expertness and we are too prone to the easy way. 

And so it is in other fields. We are just beginning to learn 
the power that comes to individuals and nations by specializa- 
tion which is not only economic organization of mental labor, 
but has a man-making power as yet hardly dreamed of. 



286 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

The chief mental trait that distinguishes a boy from a girl is 
his desire to know, do, or be something unique, distinctive and 
individual, and his lack of interest in doing and knowing what 
everyone around him does. His complacency in ignorance on 
common matters that would shock a girl not to know is only 
paralleled by the interest he has in something exceptional. If 
a young man is true to the metal and temper of manhood he 
will strive to excel others in something in order to keep his 
self-respect. Common knowledge and skill have little charm 
and a high-school curriculum made up of uniform and identical 
standardized blocks of knowledge repels him so that he leaves 
the table d'hote courses to the girls who like it and stay, and 
wants to feed his soul electively a la carte. As Emerson said, 
that since the world is round, every man everywhere can 
stand under the highest point of the zenith which slopes down 
in every direction from him, so in the world of knowledges 
and skills there are as many kinds of excellence as there are 
individuals with originality, if not far more, and every man 
not born short can find something in which he can become a 
master and authority and no longer an echo or a copy. His 
superiority may be as small as making needle points but in- 
dividuality is not finished till it culminates in some special 
power, nor is the ideal of a democracy fully realized till every 
person, like each cell and tissue of our body, does something 
peculiar to it and better than any other does it. This instinct 
has just now its highest academic expression in research — a 
word so often misunderstood and even perverted. A scholar 
who has once had the experience of having made — yes, or even 
of having honestly thought that he has made — a new contribu- 
tion to the sum of human knowledge, who has molded ever so 
tiny a bricklet that fits ever so obscure a corner of the great 
temple of truth, which we call by the comprehensive term 
of science, physical and humanistic, which is man's greatest 
achievement yet on earth, -has attained his intellectual majority, 
and only he has truly graduated from apprenticeship to mas- 
tery. In doing this he has also won a distinctly new and fine, 
almost regenerated mental experience. He knows truly for 
the first time what intellectual freedom is. Having once 
spoken his word to the competent in print or where they con- 
gregate, and been heard and accepted, he is a new creature, a 



MORAL EDUCATION 287 

citizen of the world of culture. Recognized as an authority 
in his field, be it ever so small, he more readily accepts the 
authority of others in their own domain and is therefore more 
docile and receptive in all other fields. Tasting what Aristotle 
calls the ecstasy of the theoretic life is to the thoroughbred 
original mind like the first taste of blood to a young tiger. He 
becomes fierce in the pursuit of truth. He has won a just self- 
respect which will help him to safeguard his moral life. The 
great world-soul has spoken through him. He is a real person, 
worth something in the world. He has a place, is of service ; 
his life has value and meaning; he is an end to himself. After 
such an experience he comes to regard mere learning and 
knowing as on a slightly lower plane, as doing business with 
other people's ideas, as dealing with second-hand knowledge or 
with goods liable to become somewhat frayed and shopworn. 
The luxury of knowing without achievement does not beckon 
him. Scholarship is not itself an accomplishment but a means 
to accomplishment needful for the higher work of discovery 
and invention. The creative man who can truly think. God's 
thoughts after Him in nature. His original revelation, wants 
to be a servant of Truth and in her pay, and experiences the 
lofty satisfaction of deep insight into fresh truth and of the 
ineluctable conviction almost lost in our day. 

Is there any need in American universities and colleges to- 
day that compares with that of greater intellectual earnestness, 
whether for faculties or for students? In the many books we 
professors write, are we not too often content to edit, translate, 
compile, conflate, report from the great European scholars 
who have themselves been to the sources and plucked the fruit 
right off the branches of the tree of knowledge and eaten it 
fresh from the stem, instead of dried, preserved, or canned? 
Are we not a little complacent with our borrowed plumes, too 
unacquainted with the delicious flavor of conviction and the 
precious experience of the eye that first sees new nuggets of 
truth quarried and shining up from the very bowels of the 
mine? Are we not prone to turn over our little budget of 
knowledge from year to year in class with not enough annual 
increment, eternally working it over and settling complacently 
to professional routine at twoscore, or more or less ? Or, be- 
cause I confess to being guilty myself, as I do, do I therefore _ 



288 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

suspect American professors generally on the principle that 
makes a villain think there are no good men and women, or 
would I shrive others in asking professors to become confes- 
sors merely because I have sinned myself by not living up to 
my ideal? 

And students should ask themselves in some quiet hour 
what they honestly love most, study or sport, pushing out into 
the great ocean of knowledge or playing in the shallows of the 
beach? Did anyone — and this is my chief point here — ever 
succeed who did not love his work better than anything else? 
Especially when everything is so intricate and apprenticeship 
so long as it is to-day, he who does not so love his work that 
it becomes play, so that he turns to it rather than anything 
else, cannot win the prizes of our day. Years ago I heard 
Henry Ward Beecher say that the best test of a man was 
what he did with his leisure; and I think that the greatest 
good fortune that can befall a man is to be able to make as his 
vocation what he loves to do during his vacation. A genius 
will fail if he attempts too much, and a dull man may highly 
succeed if he focuses and perseveres. If there is something 
that you prefer to do to anything else, that way lies your call- 
ing, and if there is no such- dominant interest that you can 
trust, let yourself go in, launch out and take chances, how- 
ever unprecedented, new and unique it is, or however old, then 
the chances are that after a few years of post-graduate 
struggle you will join the great army of tuft hunters, seeking 
ready-made places, perhaps looking up a wife with a big dot, 
being proud to hold an office and wear a livery. This is already 
the curse of French education to-day, where, from the gradu- 
ates of the Lycee up, the young baccalaureate aspires only to 
drop into a fat salary and wear a government uniform so that 
when the appointment is received and entered upon nothing 
more remains to be recorded of their lives save only the date 
of their death and the appointment of their successor. Our 
sires went, and were not sent, to college. They made their 
livelihood and did their work in the world upon the capital of 
the knowledge they got in the course; but with far greater 
opportunities, their sons and grandsons in the academic courses 
now too often get just enough attenuated culture to inoculate 
them to the point of immunity against any later, graver attacks 



MORAL EDUCATION 289 

of the passion for knowledge. In the legislative committee, 
in the council of doctors when life hangs on a thread, where 
great business schemes or technical processes or political poli- 
cies are decided, the decisive word is, and far more should and 
will be, spoken by the expert who has mastered all the facts 
and summated the world's experience. Mastery gives a sense 
of self-respect, dignity, worth, value, because personality really 
culminates in it. With a sense of a definite place in the social 
and industrial organism, and the sense of solidarity and inte- 
gral membership which comes with it, youth are best safe 
guarded from a life of mere self-indulgence ; and are given a 
potent incentive which is far more effective than any direct 
ethical inculcation. 

One cause of juvenile wildness and even crime is the long 
suininer school vacation. For two or three months, and that in 
the outdoor season, boys who have nothing to do are let loose 
on the street, where they naturally tend to grow wild and 
where idleness, especially in cities, does its worst for them. 
Perhaps worst of all is the suburb of the large city, where the 
fathers are all away and even a man on the street during the 
day is a rara avis. Here, distinctly new moral conditions arise. 
" God made the country, man made the town, but who but the 
devil made the suburb?" In vacations generally mothers 
who have been wont to the great relief caused by the absence 
of their children in school find it hard to have them in the 
house and so let them run at large. Their activity finds new 
vents and they range wider as they grow older and as their 
instincts for social aggregation with their mates strengthen. 
Vacation is harder on clothes, and appetites are greater and 
meal times irregular. Parents, especially mothers, are thus 
not infrequently worn out, long for school to begin, and sigh 
with relief when the children are well started for it in the 
morning, realizing that not only their own troubles but the 
dangers and temptations of their offspring are lessened. 

Another cause of lawlessness rarely noted is the grozving 
absence of families of the better class during hot zveather. The 
very presence of the respectables in their homes and upon the 
street makes more or less for order in their locality; but the 
desertion of home for summer resorts not only impresses those 
who remain with perhaps slight and unconscious jealousy of 
20 



290 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

their superior position in the scale of weakh and comfort in 
being able to seek desirable localities, but directly awakens in 
those who stay a sentiment that, if the grounds of their rich 
neighbors are not good enough for their use in the summer, 
they should at least not be barred to those who live near and 
stay behind. " What right have people to own the most at- 
tractive homes in several places when they can only use one at 
a time ? " is the way I have heard this feeling voiced. " We," 
it is said, " who must stay here despite the heat are at least as 
good as the workmen left in charge of the great estates " ; and 
private grounds surely ought to be open to the public when 
their owners are not using them, at the very least at stated 
times. Thus these, barred admission to attractive domains, 
flaunt social distinctions in an age when socialistic, not to say 
communistic, tendencies are more active in the popular mind 
than even it is conscious of. Surely every estate should be 
freely opened at times, and especially when the owners are 
away. 

In the recent movement against child labor, some of the 
prohibited kinds and conditions of work for juveniles would 
be in fact peculiarly helpful within the forbidden age limits, so 
that these laws have in some cases at least created an idleness 
worse in its moral effects than the former labor. Now a rap- 
idly increasing number of children who have left school are 
not allowed to accept employments which they wish, and so 
they grow wild under just the conditions and at just the age 
most exposed to moral and physical degeneration. Industrial 
schools and trade classes provide for only a very small part of 
those who might profit by them, and are often not fitted, in the 
kinds and methods of work for which they are trained, to meet 
actual conditions. There is at present hardly any compulsion 
to attend these schools, although there should be. Many em- 
ployers of skilled labor, or of that which requires intelligence 
above the average, have lately gradually raised the lower age 
limit at which they receive boys, so that older boys for mini- 
mum wages crowd out the younger. Hence the dangerous 
and often tragic years of from about twelve to fourteen or 
fifteen, just after the required schooling. Boys who then seek 
work can usually find only odd jobs; and those who can find 
steady ones often sink slowly and with great reluctance from 



MORAL EDUCATION 291 

the prolonged stress of necessity into a life of unskilled labor 
with chronic discontent. 

Social Workers and Psychological Experts in the School. — 
Doctors have been very shortsighted, especially in hospitals 
where a procession of strange patients files by. Each is ex- 
amined, diagnosed, and prescribed for ; then the next has his 
turn. Now, however, physicians are coming to feel the need 
of team work, and so progressive hospitals have social workers 
to visit the homes and learn what special worries, illness of 
bread-winners in the family, etc., contribute, and which of 
these causes, which drugs cannot reach but which are part of 
most diseases especially among the poor, can be removed. 
Better yet, preventive medicine is seeking to promote health so 
that the truly up-to-date doctor is in a sense abolishing him- 
self by engaging more and more in the study and practice of 
social and personal hygiene. It is thus found that, in nearly 
all cases of fault or flaw in our physical organism, as Dr. R. C. 
Cabot puts it, some one needs to be educated, and that some 
one must be sought, found, and trained. The doctor, we are 
told, has been too prone to judge his patients by certain rubrics, 
categories, and classes, not realizing that each patient presents 
features, perhaps the most vital ones, keys to the whole situa- 
tion, that are entirely new and which have never been de- 
scribed in any text-books or lectures, and perhaps never seen 
before in a clinic. Hence the doctor must now be a humanist 
as well as a scientist if he wishes to see all the facts in a case. 

Yet more true is all this of the teacher, who usually knows 
so little about his or her individual pupils, but deals with them 
in groups and grades; and where individuals are attended to, 
set rules are followed. How far all this is from the realization 
that every child is a unique problem by itself, and that its 
success or failure in life may depend upon bringing out its own 
proprium, as the scholastics called the particular thing in each 
that differentiated him from everyone else! Teachers need a 
great development of their sense of individuality and personal- 
ity, such as is now impelling physicians to seek and, if possible, 
find some new scientific truth in every case instead of seeing in 
it only what had been seen before. Every moral fault in every 
child also means that some one has lacked and needed educa- 
tion; but to find this source of defect often requires a very 



292 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

careful survey. No moral treatment worthy the name is 
possible in many cases until the child's daily life, food, hygiene, 
ethical surroundings, history, and heredity have been studied. 
Ordinary school codes with their rewards and punishments for 
specific acts are like medical prescriptions at sight, given by 
rule for certain symptoms. Hence trained social workers 
should be attached to every school, and team work between the 
teacher, school physician, and clinician, the nurse, the home, 
and the social environment is necessary to make amends for 
specialization of effort which ignores if it does not sacrifice the 
unity of the child. Soon it will be seen to be absurd to ad- 
minister education alike for all, with uniformity of method 
and standard, without regard to poverty or wealth, ignorance 
or culture, disease or health, idleness or overwork, home re- 
lations, etc. The rich need expert advice for their children as 
much as the poor, and sometimes more. A consulting child 
psychologist, sociologist, and hygienist, to whom both parents 
and children may be taught to apply for relief, possibly with 
office and visiting hours, and a clientele of families, and per- 
haps even fees ultimately for those who can pay, with services 
free to all patrons of the school to which they are attached, 
is a growing need. Here domestic difficulties need disen- 
tangling, there the lessons of new and sudden experiences need 
to be drawn for those who lack the wisdom to draw them for 
themselves. Many a marred character can be mended, if it be 
once realized that souls and traits are the supreme objects of 
concern and that all schools ought primarily to be schools of 
philanthropy. Every child should have the benefit of being 
occasionally the theme of a conference or council, and its 
moral health should be prescribed for from among the growing 
materia medica now at the command of the ethical therapeutist, 
such as playgrounds and apparatus, dietaries, regimen, home 
and other work and service, direct charity, the type of school, 
or the kind of education — whether boarding or day, for normal 
or subnormal, defective, reformatory, etc. Every problemati- 
cal or exceptional child, and eventually every child, then, 
should have the benefit of an occasional psycho-analysis by all 
the very best-established methods of laboratory and of psycho- 
therapy where moral diagnosis and treatment can be had. 
How pitifully little our stock ethics knows of the psychology, 



MORAL EDUCATION 293 

e. g., of the hard-pressed, or d|||ams of the new weakh of both 
practical and scientific knowledge not yet gathered in text- 
books or even reports upon these most vital topics, which is 
now being garnered in the minds of experienced and sagacious 
social workers who get hard up against those who are them- 
selves hard up against the great death-and-life struggle for 
survival ! ^ 

Moral education must first of all remove all that cramps 
the soul of childhood. It must realize that some children need 
hard work and would be saved by it; while others need rest 
and leisure; some are spoiling for lack of kindness, and some 
for lack of severity ; some need more control, some more free- 
dom, for some are ausgelassen and some repressed. Boys are 
sometimes morally cured of their worst vices by hardship and 
exposure to wind and weather; while others need the greatest 
tenderness and protection. Thus moral education cannot be 
much taught in classes or by rule, but is largely a matter of 
individual prescription : one child's food is another's poison. 
There is almost nothing good and bad for all alike. Thus we 
shall never solve the problem of moral education until we base 
treatment always and everywhere upon careful study of each 
person. Hence the present methods of schooling masses 
in uniform ways, very actively and positively, disqualifies 
teachers for this most important of all the functions of the 
school. They cannot see the trees for the woods. Perhaps 
probation work will be of different degrees and types, so that 
all children can share its ameliorating and beneficent influences. 

Justice that simply seeks to prove the fact or act and then 
apply the penalty as if all were equal before the law is now 
generally admitted to be obsolete for the young, although the 
legal mind is still prone to divide the world into two sharply 
demarked classes, such as criminal or law-abiding, sane or 
insane, guilty or not guilty; when in fact there is very little 
in the lives of most of us that makes either one of these exclu- 
sive of the other. All boys are difficult and probably criminal 
under a strict definition of that term at certain stages, because 
their growth is not symmetrical, so that as Barr and Taylor 



' Here I am indebted to Richard C. Cabot. Social Service and the Art of 
Healing. New York, Moffat, Yard & Co., 1909, 192 p. 



294 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

have pointed out, their age is m||de up of at least two factors — 
years and degree of psychic and physical development — which 
often do not coincide, some traits being premature, others be- 
lated, some impulses excessive and tumultuous, and others 
just beginning to bud. Certain it is that all who deal with 
boys should above all keep themselves openminded and always 
be ready to modify all the knowledge they have acquired be- 
fore, in view of a single case. Probably our best legislation is 
just now provisional.^ 

Correlation of Agencies. — The time is not far ofif when we 
shall co5rdinate all educational agencies for all classes of chil- 
dren of school age, whether they be actually in or out of school. 
Hitherto, orphanages, reformatories, institutions for the deaf, 
blind, idiotic, etc., have generally been under separate control 
and managed with very diverse degrees of intelligence. Very 
few or no normal schools or academic courses in education fit 
teachers or instructors for these institutions. All of them as 
well as truant schools, perhaps children's hospitals, infirmaries, 
nurseries, juvenile courts, child-labor agencies, creches, and 
all other public and private institutions for the care and better- 
ment of the bodies, minds or morals of children should corre- 
late their work so that eventually it may all become so con- 
solidated that each child can be placed in that position in 
the whole great system which will do most and best for it 
at each stage and so that changes from one to the other can be 
made whenever it becomes for the welfare of the child. All 
these are educational in the large sense of that word, although 
each has its own ends. Diversities of agencies, aims and 
methods should increase; and incorrigibles, defectives, home- 
less, neglected, backward children and the rest should each 
have special provision ; but integration should keep pace with 
this differentiation. This is not necessary so much for econo- 
my of administration although it would bring that gain, as for 
increased efficacy along each line by contact with all the rest 
and for the all-dominant interests of the children, each one of 
whom should have all the advantages of such a new and vaster 
elective system in which parent and experts assigned each 



* R. R. Perkins, Treatment of Juvenile Delinquents. Rockford, C. F. Mcintosh, 
1906, 77 p. (University of Chicago thesis.) 



MORAL EDUCATION 295 

child its fittest milieu, whether the corrective, vocational, 
remedial or cultural aims dominated. One or two misfit pupils 
in a class anywhere waste the teacher's energy vastly out of 
proportion to their numbers, for work with homogeneous 
groups insures pedagogic economy. The same waste occurs 
with misplaced teachers. If all could be sure of the place in 
the whole scheme where they could do their best work and 
make themselves most valuable, there would be great gain and 
in this environment teachers would continue to grow and at a 
surprising rate. 

It is from this point of view that we should welcome every 
step by which this great and laborious correlation is advanced 
— when, for instance, a superintendent is made member of the 
Juvenile Court Commission, or a teacher made judge, or the 
latter placed on the school board ; where only teachers of pro- 
fessional training are employed in corrective institutions or in 
those for defectives; where charity experts and physicians in- 
terested in orthopaedics or children's diseases and hospitals are 
brought into intimate contact with school work or administra- 
tion ; where the s?,me health inspectors are employed for public 
schools and charity institutions, etc. This kind of consolida- 
tion which is now happily increasing should thus take account 
of and bring out individuality and not suppress it as is now 
done by the indiscriminating mass methods in vogue. 

Laziness as a Root of Immorality. — The chief enemy of 
active virtue in the world is not vice but laziness, languor, and 
apathy of will. The law of least effort is universal. We 
economize labor by machines, evade thought by creeds, and 
real moral decisions by habits or, at best, rules. The learn- 
ing of even so-called scholars often seems to consist largely 
in knowing how not to think themselves but to utilize some- 
one's else thinking instead, as parasites live upon the food of 
their hosts. It is hard to reason, decide, judge; and so the 
minimum of labor often comes to seem the snmmum bonum. 
Many a man in the unconscious depths of his soul is dominated 
by the problem how to find the easiest way and life, and what 
labor-saving devices he can discover ready made. It sometimes 
almost seems as if a brilliant intellect finds its highest use in de- 
vising new ingenious ways of shirking. Our colleges abound 
in young men in quest of making a livelihood more easily than 



296 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

their sires did. It requires far less effort to appropriate other 
people's ideas than to forge out those of our own, as Plato 
accused Aristotle of getting his thoughts by the lazy man's 
way of reading rather than by the harder and more original 
way of thinking them out for himself. One is hewing out 
fresh stones from the quarry, and the other is getting them 
by despoiling old structures. Genesis tells us that work came 
into the world as a curse, and so we seek soft berths of routine, 
with no appeal to originality. That few realize the horror 
and even phobia of work that rules in the depths of their own 
soul makes the matter worse rather than better. Students 
are peculiarly prone to this aversion for real work, and no- 
where are so many specious substitutes in use to avoid it as in 
academic institutions. For many with little mental energy, 
even a serious thought of work is fatiguing and brings either 
despondency or resentment, according to temperament. It is 
hard to understand, and so they fall back on memory, which 
is easier ; it is hard to investigate, and so they compile ; hard 
to reason to the uttermost upon every day's research, and so 
they accumulate protocol data, tables, slides, or describe clini- 
cal cases, as if under the hallucinatory hope that some great 
synthetizer would arise sometime in the future who could 
find out what their data meant and work it up with others, or 
that the dear God who in the beginning brought order out of 
chaos may some day give them a single creative moment, in 
the fervid heat of which their unleavened, unkneaded dough 
may be baked into the bread of life. Some students rely on 
coaches, ponies, while the baser sort may swindle at examina- 
tions, plagiarize, fake and bluff their way through the portals 
that are meant to keep the unlearned from the learned ; and in 
many ways, by the psychology which remains to be investi- 
gated, injure their intellectual conscience itself which naturally 
cleaves to truth as the supreme good. How many pretend to 
do what they have not honestly done, scamping the duty of 
making due acknowledgments to those by whose work they 
have profited ? When a discoverer gets to the point where no 
one else has ever penetrated, he is for the nonce beyond the 
reach of every critic or every kind of corrective or control and 
may, if he will, fabricate more or less with at least transient 
impunity and present clever, easy guess work as if it were hard 



MORAL EDUCATION 297 

demonstration. Now, study or mind work is infinitely harder 
than physical toil ; and for this reason, as well as because 
standardizations are more difficult, its products are often 
adulterated. One unique type of student, sometimes classed 
among the intellectuals, is of those always buzzing with busy 
work, actively marking time without advancing, fluttering 
like a candle in the wind, running up against many great topics 
but penetrating none, thinking themselves cultivated when 
they are only stimulated and excited, affecting an all-sided 
scholarship when they are really only scatterbrains. 

Now both talent and genius, as opposed to all this, consist 
chiefly in the passion and love of work, sustained and severe 
work, in some field and upon some theme, the ability to 
toil on without exhaustion, because inspired by perpetual 
interest and warmed by self-feeding fires. Such men have 
an instinctive and spontaneous lust for activities which to 
softer souls seem drudgery. Most of us when the time 
draws near, as, e. g., in summing up for theme writing, 
when we must nerve ourselves for real mental efifort, first 
exhaust about every method of procrastination and ease- 
ment. We think of many half-relevant and incidental quasi- 
preparatory things to do. Perhaps we small down the task by 
eliminating certain sections or topics, or fleetingly think of 
changing to another theme which has suddenly loomed upon 
our interest and seems, as all new themes do, like a soft snap. 
It may be that we postpone portions of our work to some more 
convenient season, or wish various extensions of time, personal 
exceptions, or haggle with ourselves, commit ourselves to 
various resolves to finish and round everything out in some 
definite future time, and thus mortgage our life with obliga- 
tions that will probably never be foreclosed. It may be that 
we linger a little longer, and still more fondly, in the stage of 
reading, note taking, and forestudies — but at length we re- 
luctantly plunge in and actively do make perhaps the first real 
effort to think of our lives by warming u^ and fusing all our 
data, trying to intuit the inner meaning and connection, to 
grasp the underlying ideas and weld them into a true, logical 
order. It is in such an effort that the higher education culmi- 
nates, because only by this can the scholar really test himself. 
Something like this, and this alone, is work. 



298 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Now, in the moral world laziness is the great enemy. 
Wrong is easy and right is hard. City youth are prone to be 
restless and overstimulated, to be " always looking and listen- 
ing and never thinking." Amidst outer distractions they 
know more of Timbuctoo than of themselves. They have 
much experience but do not profit by it because they lack vigor 
and will to infer its lessons. Our moral prescriptions are 
usually made to fit a few great deeds, whereas moral success 
in modern life requires sustained endeavor to do many little 
things. Just here we can see how procrastination is the great 
paralyzer of the will and even the destroyer of character. To 
lie abed half an hour realizing that one ought to get up now, 
to carry around day after day the feeling that one ought to 
write a letter or do an errand and yet not to do it, to extract 
satisfaction from good resolves dated well ahead — " I will be- 
gin next week," to dawdle on with many unfinished things, 
weakens virtue by divorcing knowledge and actmn which 
should be one and inseparable. Thus we lose instead of gain- 
ing self-mastery, which is an art that requires great assiduity. 
By diligence virtue can be developed as good taste can. 

One of the best means to this end is meditation. We can 
control the movements of the eye and thus to some extent can 
fixate attention and so develop associations, and thus bring out 
weak sentiments and ideas. We can chew our food enough 
by taking pains. We can learn to use our best moments for 
resolutions and new initiations. We can voluntarily hold be- 
fore the mind the disgust that follows error and sin, which 
easy-going minds tend to forget and so lose their lessons. St. 
Dominic invented the rosary to help focus attention in prayer. 
The attitude of bodily devotion, like kneeling and clasping the 
hands, helps in prayer as gestures bring certain states which 
they express. We can cultivate the habit of reflection, if but 
briefly, when we rise in the morning and retire at night, at the 
beginning of a school term or its close, on anniversaries, birth- 
days, and the New Year. These struggles may be like those 
of an athletic swimmer against a current where he has to use 
all his efifort for a long time to make a little progress ; but all 
these things liberate power and aid self-conquest. Just as we 
may extend our vocabulary and improve in diction by inces- 
sant practice, so by patient attention to details we can better 



MORAL EDUCATION 299 

our character. By directing thoughts we guide acts and feel- 
ings, and may thus divert them from things of sense to the 
highest objects. 

Great efforts are occasionally also necessary. In some 
parts of our psychic garden we must cultivate a few of the 
largest growths and see that the soul is not too crowded with 
little ones. Our college associates who ridicule hard workers 
do so to hide their own shame. Severe toil gives not only a 
joy that lifts us far above petty annoyances and thus helps 
nervous control, but it also brings a sense of reality and worth. 
All strong young men need to work with ardor as if the voice 
of God called them. Always do the nearest if not the hardest 
thing, and not wait. I know a professor who has read Homer 
and quite a row of books during the moments daily spent at 
toilet in his bath room, as if Cloaca were a muse to whom he 
brought sacrifice ; and I have read of a man who presented his 
wife with a volume he wrote in the fragments of time she kept 
him waiting for dinner. This gleaning of scattered moments 
means earnestness and high charged moral efficiency. Men 
who can do these things do not accept defeat meekly. They 
never take refuge in fatalism by saying that they inherited 
handicapping propensities or defects but think instead of being 
lords of their own fortune, and seem sometimes to be able to 
defy not only environment but heredity itself. They deem it 
weakness to control everything around them and to be slaves to 
a lawless and untamed self, and realize that one who rules his 
own spirit is indeed better than the conqueror of a city. As 
students they do not excuse themselves by pleading lack of op- 
portunity or incentive. Haeckel says in substance that " the 
scientific output of a university is generally inversely as its 
size." Mere erudition does no doubt dull the intellect. The 
great creators in science, art, literature, and the rest have been 
moral adventurers, and with the greatest power of initiative 
are often far less learned and scholarly than even their pupils. 
They are full of inventiveness but careful in verification, com- 
bining criticism and creation, suggestiveness and doubt. 
These in due proportion make great minds whose faculties are 
never allowed to rust and who never would think of blaming 
fate, circumstance, or opportunity. 

Besides languor, the other great moral enemy is sense. 



300 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Carlyle condemned all musing on the tender passion and called 
love a miserable trifle of life which in a truly heroic epoch 
would be hardly thought of, and condemned the novelists who 
make sex gratification the focus of all the interests their ro- 
mances portray. Some think excessive athletics contributes to 
sense by way of reaction. Young men should plan to marry 
young. During the probationary period, if absolute victory 
is hard and rare, we should nevertheless not lose heart at 
occasional lapses. The secret of virtue here again is the con- 
trol of thoughts ; and to " see life " is dangerous. The Cath- 
olic Church with great wisdom in this as in so many other 
respects provides retreats where the young retire to take 
account of their moral debit and credit, to sum up results, to 
take bearings and soundings, to gather, store up, and assimi- 
late the lessons of their own experience which so often go 
unutilized, owing to incessant outer solicitations that make us 
strangers to ourselves. 

For moral education too much cannot be said in favor of 
biographies, if not too long, and of men whose lives are full 
of ethical uplift, and which appeal to the heroic instincts of the 
young.^ Here again the Catholic Church has in its Lives of 
the Saints a great arsenal of material rich to this end. Comte 
in his famous calendar set apart also a lay saint or a hero of 
science, a hero of political or social virtue for each day of the 
year. We have not utilized sufficiently this powerful incen- 
tive ; and even Plutarch's Lives, which used to elevate the souls 
of our sires, is now rarely read by the young. If the young, 
who always ought to seek acquaintance with their superiors 
and the best of whom tend to do so, really meet a great man in 
flesh and blood, he easily becomes a captain of their souls with 
almost absolute power. In illustration of this we need only 
to realize what some of the great confessors have been — what 
Fichte did with the students of Germany, and what Lavisse 
has in our own day done for and with the students of Paris." 

' E. J. Swift, Mind in the Making. New York, C. Scribner's Sons, 1908, 
329 p. See Chap. I. 

^ In the last paragraphs I have probably drawn rather freely from the im- 
pressions left by the recent reading of J. Payot's admirable Education of the Will; 
authorized translation by Smith Ely Jelliffe, from the thirtieth French edition. 
New York, Funk & Wagnalls Co., 1909, 424 p. See also another book of the same 
title by T. Sharper Knowlson, Philadelphia, Lippincott, 1909, 210 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 301 

Honor Systems and Self-government by Pupils and Stu- 
dents. — H. D. Sheldon ^ and many others whose work I have 
elsewhere described " have shown the great difference between 
the spontaneous and the adult-directed social organizations of 
young people. The crude native instinct of boys to get and act 
together is best seen in the gang which, if unleavened by 
maturer influences, tends to be predatory, savage, tribal, but 
with a very strong, rude sense of honor and loyalty. They 
often tend to be independent and even defiant of restraint, but 
it is from the social instinct which they express that a large 
group of the most potent moralizing agencies must take their 
departure. Statistics show that the great majority of boys 
have at some period belonged to them or to similar organiza- 
tions. They exist by the score in large American cities, in 
two of which nearly a hundred each have been found. Of 
the many studies made in this field reference to one must here 
suffice. 

J. A. Puffer has made the best and last of many recent studies 
of boys' gangs. ^ In 66 gangs there were 651 boys, an average of less 
than 10 each. Large gangs often split up into small ones. Their 
names are often taken from the locality, but others are unique, e. g., 
White Rats, Eggmen, Johnny Boys. They nickname each other 
from physical or psychic peculiarities : Puggy is a boy with flat nose ; 
Cross-eyed, Ginger-head, Happy Hooligan, Pung Lung, Fat (be- 
cause he was fat), Jo Six Toes (because four were cut off), Smuck, 
Bum, Foxy, Duffer, etc. The average age of these boys was just 
under fourteen, nearly all being from ten to fifteen and not very 
many composed entirely of one nationality, although Jews were ex- 
cluded from all. Most meet daily, perhaps at street corners, most 
often evenings. Leaders are strongest, best players, fighters, good- 
natured, smartest, etc. Entrance is usually informal, though most 
new members have to undergo a good deal of buffeting. Few have 
any real initiation. They do not seek members but expel those who 
squeal, spy, lie against the gang or will not fight on occasion. The 
principle is " I stand by you, you stand by me." They divvy up 
plunder. Many gangs are of long standing. They tend to regard 
strangers as enemies, usually have nothing to do with girls unless to 
tease them, for it is the age when the two sexes have few interests 

^ History and Pedagogy of American Student Societies. New York, Appleton, 
1901, 366 p. See also his Institutional Activities of American Children. Am. 
Jour, of Psy., July, 1898, vol. 9, pp. 425-448. 

^ G. S. Hall, .A.dolescence. N. Y., Appleton, 1904, vol. 2. See p. 396 et seq. 

3 Boys' Gangs, Ped. Sem., June, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 175-212. 



302 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

in common. Their games and nearly all their other activities require 
cooperation. Swimming is one of their passions. The things chiefly- 
stolen are edibles or objects to play with, and things to sell come 
third. They are prone to pick up fights. The members are often 
migratory and often beat their way to other places. They love to 
hunt, fish, camp, be out nights, get close to nature, play pranks, call 
names, loaf, have intense passion for theaters, shows, and will do al- 
most anything to get the price of admission. Boys of the same age 
have a great passion for being together. They run and hunt with 
the pack and are sometimes ferocious when together, showing the 
greatest energy, which only needs direction. At this age boys crave 
experience and must have excitement. Very few boys of the lower 
and middle social classes do not belong to gangs, which are much 
like savage tribes in their disposition and organization. The virtues 
of the gang are love of exercise, admiration of courage, strength, 
justice, loyalty, obedience to the leader. The gang does not develop 
chastity, and is often noted for uncleanliness of talk, sometimes of 
conduct. It develops runaways as well as nocturnal habits. Some 
have thought its attraction inversely as the home. It is often very 
hard to get boys from tough gangs into clubs and it takes a shrewd 
man to reach them. To do so he must have courage, good nature, 
and generosity to stand in with and to influence them. The gang has 
a strong mfluence in subordinating the individual to the group and 
the. general impression now is that the gang should not be suppressed 
but should be controlled and directed. 

To make over the gang into a boys' club is a great step and 
a hard one, requiring a tact, skill, and knowledge of boy nature 
which we have not yet learned how to teach. The City Boys' 
Club with provision for indoor games, gymnasia, swimming 
tanks, reading, billiards, etc., often fails with all these attrac- 
tions to draw many boys save in cold weather, because the call 
of the freer, breezier life of the street is louder. Many of 
these are designed for boys in the earliest teens and do not 
admit new members approaching the twenties, even though 
they may retain the old ones up to this age. The allegiance 
of the gang leaders to these organizations is often but partial ; 
and many clubs have an upper-age limit that is too low, and 
seem to be afraid to break in raw, wild, older boys. This, of 
course, has partial justification wherever separate provision 
cannot be made, because pre- and post-pubescents should be 
more or less separated, as Crampton has so well shown, and 
older tend to make trouble of many kinds for younger boys. 
Much as has been done in this country and in England, no 



MORAL EDUCATION 303 

city has clubs enough to provide for more than a small fraction 
of those who would be benefited by them ; and girls' clubs are 
still very few. The work of providing for wholesome social 
intercourse between boys and girls during the later teens — 
which is one of the most vital of all problems — is generally 
regarded as too intricate and delicate to grapple with.^ Lads 
who work are more amenable to all efforts to regulate their 
social life than are boys in school, partly because they average 
older, but partly also because industry teaches a certain 
subordination. 

Still further from the gang and requiring more transforma- 
tion of its spirit are institutions for boys in the early and 
middle teens which are mainly under religious influences. 
Like the Knights of King Arthur, Junior Endeavor, and 
many other org-anizations, here, too, belong mimic states 
which control the daily life of boys — like Boy City, Gunckel's 
Boyville, the George Junior Republic, etc. All these interest- 
ing institutions are the creations of tactful and devoted men, 
reaching a few score, or at most a few hundred boys each. 
They might, of course, be indefinitely extended in number and 
variety without limit. These I have discussed elsewhere {op. 
cit.). The actual status of the morals of boys and girls 
regarding certain questions of minor morals with which adults 
who organize self-government schemes are relatively far too 
much concerned, is probably correctly glimpsed in the follow- 
ing study. 



^ In a very interesting work by C. E. B. Russell and L. M. Rigby (Working 
Lads' Clubs. London, Macmillan, 1908, 445 p.; see also Winifred Black's Boys' Self- 
Goveming Clubs. New York, Macmillan, 1903, 218 p.), much sympathy is expressed 
with the efforts of youths and maidens to get together as seen on the streets which 
are often unpleasantly crowded when they promenade, and where there is often rough 
horseplay and jostling in the instinct of fun. These authors think that even pick- 
up acquaintances here are often salutary and may lead to excellent marriages. 
That the sexes must meet in this way, however, is unfortunate and is a sad com- 
mentary on the lack of homes to provide for their meeting under normal conditions. 
Buck says, " Ultimately girls and women in every rank of society are very much 
what boys and men make them." If lads appreciate or condone boisterous jesting 
or unseemly familiarity, girls will follow the lead, but they have great influence in 
turn upon the propriety of both word and deed by the boys. In the middle teens 
he deems it very necessary that adequate provision should be made for proper, 
natural and innocent friendships between the two, that they may learn to understand 
each other better. 



304 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Dr. A. Tanner^ collected data of 615 boys and girls, mostly from 
II to 15 years of age, and found that 75 per cent would not tell on a 
playmate; 17 per cent would lie to protect him; 71 per cent would 
not cheat in a game ; 71 per cent would return a lost article they 
found and whose owner they knew, if they disliked him, whereas 
92 per cent would do so if they liked the owner; of girls 46 per 
cent would tell on a playmate, as against 25 per cent of boys, show- 
ing either that girls' consciences are more tender or that they have 
less esprit de corps; 23 per cent of the boys admitted that they 
would cheat at a game, as against 12 per cent of the girls; 45 per 
cent of the boys would put bad money in a slot machine, and 52 per 
cent would pass it, as against 18 per cent and 5 per cent of the girls 
respectively. Far more would do wrong things to help others than 
to help themselves. Moral matters like these are with children of 
this age not so very unlike matters of taste. Their conscience is 
largely a social product, so that it is not being discovered, but being 
condemned, that is dreaded. 

In grammar grades Wilson L. Gill ^ has embodied one of the best- 
known and most influential schemes of pupil self-government at the 
State Normal School at New Paltz, which has three school cities : 
the primary for little children, the intermediate for older boys and 
girls, and the normal for young men and women. Each of these is 
organized into wards, has mayors, sheriffs, judges, etc., with consti- 
tutions increasing in elaborateness up the grades. The three cities 
constitute the school state. A school city imitates, as far as it can, 
a real city government. The greatest penalty is the deprivation of 
the rights of citizenship. 

Colin A. Scott allows children in the lower grades to form them- 
selves into spontaneous groups, on the basis of mutual attraction, 
and to do certain things : print, cook, etc., which he seeks to guide 
and utilize.^ 

A more elaborate and apparently successful form of self-gov- 
ernment in the grades is that of the New York City grammar master, 
Cronson, who organized the four upper grades, comprising some four 
hundred children, into a city, of which each class was a borough, and 
all together constituted a nation. His book ^ is the most stimulating 
and interesting of all the literature that has yet appeared on self- 
government for the public grammar school, and is far too complex 
to describe adequately here. There is a constitution, by-laws, legis- 
lative, executive, and judicial functions, borrowing almost every 
feature from city, township. State and national administration. 

* Children's Ideas of Honor, Ped. Sem., Dec, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 509-513. 

^ The School City; report on the system of civic education devised by Wilson 
L. Gill. Reprinted from the Journal of the Franklin Institute, Philadelphia, 
1903, II. p. 

3 Social Education. Boston, Ginn & Co., 1908, 300 p. See Chaps. VI andVII. 

« Bernard Cronson, Pupil Self-Government. N. Y., Macmillan, 1907, 107 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 3^5 

Boys edit papers, make and audit financial reports, conduct charity 
agencies, hospitals, fresh-air funds, perhaps wear a uniform, some- 
times multiply oificials so that there are few privates left, have rapid 
transition of office, levy and raise taxes, have elaborate political 
campaigns with debates and mass meetings, map out imaginary cities 
with parks, fire, health, police, educational, and penal departments, 
show plenty of partisanship; and all this work is said to give much 
zest to the study of history, parliamentary law, and social and civic 
institutions generally. The truant squad seems particularly effective 
in a largely Italian population. There can be no doubt that many 
boys under the right leaders can and do derive much advantage from 
these organizations, but there is always need of wise and experienced 
guidance; and wherever such an institution succeeds there is always 
back of it some person with insight and acquired talent for this 
peculiar work and giving much time to it. It is thus at root a mode 
of control by adults. Usually the young are subjugated and led by 
a wiser leader, and the gang spirit is sublimated. 

W. B. Forbush,^ than whom the country has no better authority 
or wiser leader in this field, thinks that the instincts of play and 
friendship which animate all kinds of juvenile organizations are on 
the whole best put to work in connection with nature study, field 
work, woodcraft, and camping out, with a spirit like that repre- 
sented by the better part of Thompson Seton's Indian work, Baden 
Powell's scouting parties, Y. M. C. A. camps, and the farm and gar- 
den work of Doctors Hodge, Bigelow, G. E. Johnson, O. J. Kern, 
Rufus Stanley, and the Cornell people. Dr. Forbush has catalogued 
nearly one hundred and fifty clubs for street boys, reaching perhaps 
100,000 members, and the Y. M. C. A. reaches twice as many. When 
we add to this the work of the social settlements, the churches, the 
twenty-five national movements for the uplift of boys, we realize 
how extensive this work now is. Mass clubs, which began forty 
years ago, need to be broken up into small groups if there are 
workers enough, and yet the esprit de corps of the larger group 
should not be lost. If educational or religious work is pushed too 
far, the club becomes a girls' society, so that the rude virtues of the 
gang must never be eliminated or the club will share the fate of the 
famous horse in myth whose fodder was reduced a few grains of 
oats per day to accustom him to eat less, a scheme which worked 
well until the horse died. Boys go in groups even to revivals and 
when they join the church they enter, as Coe puts it, " God's gang." 
They must not be educated to become " perfect ladies," as Forbush 
declares he was at first. The key-boys must be picked and the club 
raised to the level of the best instead of being allowed to sink to the 
level of the worst, as it tends to in the gang. Frank Parsons and the 
Y. M. C. A. are doing good work in aiding boys to a wise choice of 
vocations. The question, however, will not down, in the survey of 

* Boys' Clubs. Fed. Sem., Sept., 1909, vol. 16, pp. 337-343. 
21 



3o6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

all these activities, whether or not a strong man could not do better 
by direct personal action upon the boys, or at least whether the club 
should obviate that and whether many workers do not oversocialize 
the boy at the expense of some precious factors of individuation. 
The boys' club is a great agency in breaking down the barriers of 
mutual ignorance between adults and childhood and teaching the 
former the dialect of childhood. The club is a necessary supple- 
ment of home, school and church. The more boys are really under- 
stood, the better they seem to be at heart, at least as they can be 
isolated from bad environments. 

As to self-government in secondary schools. While 
formal honor or self-government schemes are almost unknown 
in normal schools beyond bringing the faculty and students 
together if there is misunderstanding, there are a few public 
high schools, still more private academies, manual and in- 
dustrial, and most of all military schools of secondary grade, 
that have tried some of these autonomous schemes. 

The advocates of these schemes illustrate the strong drift 
which is characteristic of the present to oversocialize young 
people. There are in fact two elements in education, proper 
balance between which is of vital consequence. First in time 
if not in importance comes the evolution of personality, the 
development of the individual. No person is educated until 
he has found his own proprium or the interest by which he 
can be most controlled, kindled, the thing for which he has 
most ability and can do best, or the conviction that he is ready 
to stand by. City boys more than those from the country 
are prone to think, act, judge, in masses and therefore to be- 
come all alike. The large, graded class, too, tends to blunt 
and efface individuality, which is the most precious thing in 
the world. The self-governors aid this process. We cannot 
be too frequently reminded that no two people are alike, that 
every boy needs individual treatment, a mentor, adviser, or 
some one else to study him to find what vocation he is best 
fitted for. Few are so able that they will not fail if they do 
too much or fall into the wrong niche ; and few are so stupid 
that they will not succeed if they find their right niche and 
limit themselves according to their talent. Education of old 
used to lay great stress upon periods of retreat, meditation, 
solitude, that one might get a little acquainted with oneself, 
which in our age young people know nothing of. Until one 



MORAL EDUCATION 307 

has once had the experience of standing on his own conviction 
against that of his fellows, until he has found that he knows 
some one thing that no one else does, or can do something 
unique and peculiar, he has not found himself; and over- 
socialization makes young people to-day drift still farther 
away from true self-knowledge. 

The term " pupil and student self-government " is somewhat non- 
descript. It designates an amorphous thing which might be measured 
on several scales, viz.: (i) Up and down the grades. Certain forms 
of it are found in university and college and students have had no 
acquaintance with anything of the kind in their previous course. 
Again, Arnold, of Rugby, governed his students through the upper 
class which he ruled himself. In some of our schemes little tots 
who can only make their mark in the lowest primary can vote, 
although illiterate voting is excluded in our republic. (2) These 
schemes vary immensely in elaborateness. Sometimes there is noth- 
ing but a small committee of students steered by members of the 
faculty, or the principal, or teachers. The pupil members are sup- 
posed to influence their mates, but the latter are not affected. While 
at the other extreme we have the complete state with almost every 
institution found in city or nation represented. (3) The topics 
considered by the pupil self-governors have a wide range. In the 
higher academic grades the government often deals with nothing 
save cheating in examinations ; while in some of the lower grades 
every civic duty and many matters of personal morality are included. 
It is rather curious that the higher up the grades we go, the less the 
range of these schemes over conduct. We should suppose it would 
be the reverse. While space has only three dimensions, self-govern- 
ment has a fourth, viz., it may be measured by its departure from the 
gang. The street boys' club is the first step away from it, while some 
of the purely church organizations have succeeded in depurating 
most elements of the gang; and in proportion as they do so, the 
organization leads rather a pallid life, because leaders forget that 
this is the stage of only the cruder virtues, and that boys will not be 
made into a girls' society. 

In public high schools it is rare. The most successful attempt 
I know of the former is at the large and very well-equipped Poly- 
technic High School of Los Angeles, which trains students of mature 
years and mostly of serious purpose for their work in life. The 
scheme originated spontaneously when the school was small but now 
works well with two thousand pupils. It is now known as the As- 
sociated Student Body Organizations, the membership of which is 
composed of the presidents of the several minor organizations and 
two members of the faculty elected by it. The organizations repre- 
sented are : the boys' and girls' self-government committee, the 
scholarship committee, custodian committee, fire department, ath- 



3o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

letic committee, Ionian society, oratorical society, editors, board of 
control, information and reception committee, and musical organiza- 
tions. The purpose of this higher body is to consider all questions 
referred to it by the principal or any student club, to conduct school 
elections, formulate rules concerning the award of emblems and 
conferring of honors; yet in all matters the principal is the ruling 
power, and all the power given to the students is understood to come 
from him. A detailed constitution regulates the qualifications of 
officers and their duties. 

Private high schools have in some instances adopted modified 
forms. The Hotchkiss School at Lakeville, Connecticut, requires 
students to give their word of honor to observe the school rules in 
respect to smoking; and with regard to this the method seems to 
work well. The Branham and Hughes School in Tennessee has a 
scheme aiming at unity of action, academic pride, and definite con- 
victions. The principal's rule is stern, but students' opinion and 
cooperation are sought, especially in athletics. The Worcester 
Academy has a board of monitors centering in four seniors chosen 
by the faculty, together with three more nominated by the faculty 
and elected by the students. This board reports infringements of 
rules and makes recommendations to the principal. Every scheme 
involving detective or espionage work is very unpopular here. The 
scheme works best where there are military features, like the Marion 
Military School of Alabama, which has a system of self-government 
much like that of the University of Virginia, with a constitution 
that vests authority in a faculty council and a corps of students or 
commons, including all members of the school not in the council. 
The judicial department consists of a supreme court and a lower 
court, the former sitting in such cases as lying, cheating at examina- 
tions, drinking, licentiousness, and participation in any combinations 
against self-government; while the lower court sits on offenses of less 
grade. In the Bingham School, now in its Ii6th year, each student 
solemnly pledges as a gentleman to abstain " from having anything 
intoxicating in his possession or under his control, from handling 
an intoxicant belonging to another, or from going into a drinking 
saloon, from having any deadly weapons, including cartridges, in 
his possession or under his control, or from handling a deadly weapon 
belonging to another, or from using the school arms except under 
orders; from hazing (as defined by the faculty) in any shape or 
form, directly or indirectly." This is defined as " not letting a com- 
rade and his things alone " and includes causing the comrade to 
fag. All examination papers must be accompanied by a statement 
upon honor that no aid is given or received; while candidates for 
athletic honors pledge themselves to obey the captain and coach and 
to abstain from immorality and tobacco during the athletic season. 
In the Virginia Military Institute the discipline is strictly military. 
The cadets are taught that courage and personal honor are the first 
essential to the soldier. The associates of a dishonest cadet would 



MORAL EDUCATION 3^9 

report the fact to the authorities but they would not report an im- 
moraHty. This is typical of various other schools. 

The very essence of docility is stibmission to authority. 
This is one of the primary instincts of all gregarious and social 
animals. This is seen in the savage tribe, the gang, the 
athletic team, in fagging and hazing, and in military systems. 
Boys crave leadership and yield their own wills implicitly to 
coercion, if only they feel it wise and benign. They obey 
commands and grow thereby in trust and loyalty to persons, 
which Royce has shown to be so fundamental to every social 
virtue. They are innate hero-worshipers and followers, as 
if they craved a master and would make one, even of cheap 
material, if they failed to find him at hand. They will do and 
be almost anything with amazing plasticity for those whom 
they really respect and admire. From such they take orders 
on faith and without question. This means that their very 
nature and needs cry out for drill, discipline, Dressur and 
habituation before their reason is developed enough to justify 
what is required of them. This keeps the soul open, receptive, 
growing. If thoroughly trained and broken into right usages 
when they are young, they will, when they attain years of 
insight, rejoice to find that their very automatism does so much 
and so well for them. Plato would flog young people prone 
to reason about moral questions ; and Aristotle thought all mat- 
ters pertaining to politics and statecraft the supremest func- 
tion, to be reserved for the wise and most mature men ; it was 
for him that in which all education culminated. To do duties 
comes first in the apprenticeship of life, and is the only war- 
rant for demanding rights. Our training often reverses this 
and makes the young clamorous of their rights and neglectful 
of their duties. Now, were self-government for pre-pu- 
bescents in the grammar grades desirable, our survey shows 
that it is almost unrecognized in American normal schools, 
so that one fourth of our teachers who enter the profession 
actually do so totally unfitted to inaugurate or direct it. 

After these general and special reasons, I cannot be so 
very ardently desirous of a speedy, general diffusion of the sys- 
tem into the grades, much as I admire and commend the 
results sporadically attained, for I fear that, with all its 



3IO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

triumphs, there is danger of some loss in the general spirit of 
docility and obedience to authority. I fear these systems must 
be further safeguarded to prevent some weakening of the 
wholesome and fundamental instinct of unreflecting loyalty to 
commands without precocious, casuistic ratiocination concern- 
ing matters the juvenile mind is not mature enough to cope 
with without danger of forcing and overtaxing the intelligence 
at the expense of the more basal discipline of the will. Nature 
inclines childhood to be happy and careless and to seek un- 
limited freedom in order to learn wisdom at first-hand by more 
or less personal experience with folly, and to postpone the day 
of assuming the control of adult institutions which tend to rob 
the soul of boys of its gamey flavor, to reduce the capacity for 
originality, and to reverse the good old Bible adage that states 
that we must learn to rule ourselves before learning to rule 
cities. On a good horse ranch, thoroughbred colts are early 
broken into trotting with their utmost speed at times, and for 
the rest roam the pastures freely until they are quite mature. 
I confess that these little grammar-school statesmen and 
women, mayors and mayoresses, judges, and aldermen and 
women, in knickerbockers and short skirts, do not seem to me 
to be real boys and girls. As a rule their published photo- 
graphs do not attract me to make their personal acquaintance. 
Are they not missing something precious and basal that be- 
longs to their stage of life and which cannot be given later? 
Boys of this age are capable of almost any folly ; but they are 
given not only the burden of responsibility for their own con- 
duct, which should come slowly and late, but also for that of 
others. Hence, so far as I have observed, they sometimes 
tend to become precocious with their factitious authority; 
others are a little burdened and anxious ; some feel it to be 
unreal, a little like the paper money of Boy City, valid only 
within the institution, and not to be taken too seriously ; while 
there are a few, especially those not officials, but only privates, 
who remain rebels at heart, ready to revolt and assert their 
feral nature if good opportunity invites. Is all this better 
than unquestioning obedience to wiser elders? Again, at an 
age when manhood begins to assert itself, is it good for boys 
and their allegiance to school to rule and vote with and be 
under girls? Are such schools training suffragettes, and is 



MORAL EDUCATION 311 

this the best training for future mothers and housewives, or 
does it tend to obHterate sex distinctions which God and 
Nature have estabhshed ? A captain and mihtary atmosphere 
would suit this stage of development better. Again, true de- 
mocracy and republicanism came very late in the world's 
history and are for fully matured men, while if there is any- 
thing at all in the recapitulatory theory, children of this age 
are still in the monarchical stage of life, and need to be put 
through the paces and antics of a stage, where they are really 
henchmen, subject to the dominion either of the boy leader 
or of the man who is the power behind the throne. So difficult 
is this form of government of the people, by the people, and 
for the people, that we may seriously ask ourselves to-day if 
we mature American citizens have yet learned the arts and 
acquired all the virtues involved in self-government to such a 
degree that their success on our shores is finally assured, so 
long as municipal and national corruption are so rife. Is our 
legal age of majority, which brings the right to vote, too late? 
And do not boy methods of election make the boys who are 
still in the gang stage wiser in the methods of the boss and 
expose them to adopting the spirit of henchmen and followers? 
I fear that in many juvenile organizations other things are 
really learned than the august duty of citizenship " casting with 
unpurchased hand the vote that shakes the turrets of the land." 
In fine, then, my plan for pre-adolescence would be a touch, 
but not too much, of self-government. We might organize an 
upper class or two, for Arnold accomplished much of his re- 
forms through the highest class alone ; but the organization 
should not be too elaborate. We might observe and utilize 
social groups in the lower grades and go a little ways with 
Colin Scott ; but in this work we should carefully follow quite 
as much as lead the children; and for the rest we may well 
wait, watch and perpend, and above all, study and visit per- 
sonally, if possible, every school where special efforts in this 
direction are made and get behind the scenes or the printed 
page, talk with the boys, observe their real attitude both in 
conducting their organizations and outside, and be judicial 
a while longer, ready and open minded to follow just as far 
as we are wholly and heartily convinced ; for without whole- 
souled enthusiasm and faith we can do nothing here. But let 



312 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

us not forget that, in the moral regimen of boys, there must 
always be left ample space for unexplainable commands and 
implicit obedience. These schemes need a male master rather 
than a female teacher at the helm. While I am not a violent 
antisuffragist, I think that in the present stage of our social 
evolution man has more experience and more natural zest for 
politics than woman. At any rate, boys of this age will not 
take kindly to female leadership in practical civics. I think 
we must, however, conclude that the success already achieved 
constitutes a prima facie case for further observation, which 
challenges all those who are interested in moral education, and 
that we must all of us be ready to lay aside all prejudices and 
preconceptions until convinced ; accept new light and walk in 
new ways, as soon as we are fully persuaded, no matter how 
old or how firmly anchored we now are in current theories and 
practices. 

Passing now to colleges. It may be well first to glance at 
the natural status of the minds of male and female collegians 
concerning matters where honor and self-government are most 
involved. We have two studies that bear immediately upon 
this topic. 

Earl Barnes ^ analyzed written returns from 65 male and 59 
female students in three colleges as to whether they would report 
students who had stolen an examination paper from the printer and 
used it in advance, and found that 30 per cent of the men and 29 
per cent of the women would not do so, while 43 per cent of each 
sex would not report ordinary cheating in examination. If, however, 
the penalty was expulsion rather than loss of credits, 64 per cent of 
the men, and 67 per cent of the women would say No to the first, 
and 75 per cent of the men and 67 per cent of the women would say 
No to the second question. The reasons given for silence are that 
it is the professor's business, or not the student's, that tale-bearing 
is low, that it really affects only the culprit, is useless, would make 
enemies, etc. The reasons for reporting, also in the order of fre- 
quency, are that cheating wrongs honest students, hurts the institu- 
tion, makes the concealer an accessory, is a duty to society and to 
the culprit. Thus personal precedes and probably prepares for social 
ethics; if so, the former must have a period sufficient to lay founda- 
tions. The motives of those who would not report, be it remem- 
bered, are the same that make democracies slow to take up arms 

* Student Honor; a Study in Cheating. Internat. Jour, of Ethics, 1903-4, vol. 
14, pp. 481-488. 



MORAL EDUCATION 3^3 

against public abuses, as here many know them but lack the courage 
to do so. This inevitably raises the question whether the teachers' 
efforts to bring students of all grades to their views concerning 
examinations do not really result in blunting, instead of sharpening, 
the sense of honor. 

Dr. A. Tanner^ collected sincere answers to very personal ques- 
tions in 440 written returns from girl students in twelve colleges, 
and found that 40 per cent of the girls kept their money if the street- 
car conductor failed to ask them for the fare. Just half would tell 
the teacher beforehand if they were unprepared, and the other half 
would run the risk. Sixty-seven per cent would bluff, if partially 
prepared and were called on to recite ; 69 per cent would avoid a 
girl who cheated in examination so as not to have to report her; 
where the honor system prevailed, 52 per cent would report a cheater ; 
50 per cent would exaggerate to give zest to a story or conversation; 
65 per cent would tell a white lie to save people's feelings; several 
say that love is of more value than truth; only 14 per cent would 
take another's plot on which to write a supposedly original story; 
while 37 per cent would tell a credulous girl outlandish stories; and 
21 per cent would use ponies or interlinears ; 27 per cent would 
use a point incidentally seen on another's examination paper; 54 per 
cent would permit a person to have an ungrounded favorable opinion 
of themselves; if they cheated, 57 per cent would deem it more 
honorable to do so openly than secretly. If these returns are sincere 
and typical, as the author claims, they are very significant. 

In college grades most efforts at student autonomy have 
been directed against the evils illustrated in the above inquiries. 
Anna L. Kranz has lately gathered her data from thirty-three 
institutions of collegiate rank that have some kind of honor 
system, hardly two being alike, but varying with the conditions 
of each institution. There is generally a student senate, 
usually elected by students, but sometimes by the faculty. 
The members of this board vary from five to fifteen, and their 
authority ranges all the way from simple espionage of conduct 
on the campus and dormitories to suspension and expulsion. 
Often the code applies only to examinations and recitations. 
Where it includes more, plagiarism before literary societies 
and college magazines is most often provided for, then comes 
conduct outside the classes and miscellaneous conduct. There 
is usually some kind of constitution regulating elections, 
specifying jurisdiction, method of procedure, punishment of 

1 The College Woman's Code of Honor. Ped. Sem., March, 1906, vol. 13, pp. 
104-117. 



314 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the guilty. College sentiment and tradition in this matter 
vary very greatly in different institutions. The history of 
honor systems has almost nothing to do with those existing 
systems which have been created ad hoc by some enterprising 
president or by others, although to this rule there are two well- 
known exceptions. 

The first is the University of South Carolina, where an honor sys- 
tem began in 1805, and the University of Virginia in 1842, although 
the University of Illinois had one in 1868, Maine State College in 
1875, and Amherst in 1883. The honor system in Virginia is the best 
instance of a natural spontaneous growth of student government which 
this country affords and has set the fashion for others. In recent 
decades it has come to leaven the entire spirit of the university and 
has set patterns for many imitations, especially in the South, where 
the appeal to the sentiment of honor has been far more effective than 
in the North, owing to the old cavalier spirit of which the duel is the 
baser offshoot. In founding the University of Virginia, Jefferson 
himself laid great stress upon pride of character, dread of disgrace 
and humiliation. Professor Thornton, in his admirable discussions, 
shows that five unique influences have made this scheme success- 
ful. First, the architectural arrangement of the dormitories, each 
room opening directly onto a long piazza, which was also a walk 
around the quadrangle, so that espionage was almost impossible. 
Second, a strong sentiment that testimony from students must be 
voluntary. Third, unlimited freedom of students in selecting their 
own residence and courses. Fourth, the mildness of the penal codes, 
which forbade the faculty to expel the students save for dueling or to 
suspend them save for contumacy or disorder, and which had other- 
wise only the power to reprove. Fifth, the reference of all minor 
matters to a board of six student censors named by the faculty who 
should investigate and report the findings and the penalties. This 
was revolutionary eighty-six years ago, when college discipline else- 
where was severe. Soon after the University opened, as might be 
expected, there was an open conflict between professors and students, 
with much rioting. The faculty were helpless and appealed to the 
visitors, who appealed to the honor of the student body, who re- 
sponded, and peace followed for a time. The faculty found by 
bitter experience that the " stricter the laws the more numerous 
their infractions, and the sterner the discipline, the more rebellious 
the subjects," so that these hot-headed young Southerners became 
defiant, challenged the faculty, and sympathized with misdoing. 
Examination papers were submitted not even in the handwriting of 
the student. This misrule culminated in 1840 with the murder of 
the chairman of the faculty. This brought horror and indignation 
and a reaction. The better students came forward, and in 1842 a 
resolution was passed that henceforth to all written examinations 



MORAL EDUCATION 31 5 

each candidate attach a statement that he had not given, to which 
later was added nor received, help. This became the magna charta 
of the University. The honor pledge is rarely broken, and if it is, 
the students deal with it in a very summary way. Each department 
was organized with its officers to constitute an honor committee, 
with no faculty representation. The offending student is asked to 
leave the University, though if he wishes a public trial he may appeal 
to five alumni; but the guilty student rarely makes this appeal. Men 
have been expelled here for plagiarism, lying, cheating at cards, 
refusing to pay honest debts, insolence to ladies. Curiously enough, 
this honor code refuses to take notice of drunkenness, injuring prop- 
erty, gambling, betting, incontinence, cutting lectures, or idleness. 
Expulsion brings a stigma which a man can rarely live down at home 
or abroad. The students consider that the honor of their class is at 
stake. They hold that the honor of the class is in the keeping of 
each member of it. 

The honor system in South Carolina has a yet longer history but 
has less influence. When it was established in 1805, one regulation 
of government was " the rewards and punishments of this institu- 
tion shall be addressed to the sense of duty, to the principle of honor 
and shame." Twenty years later. President Cooper remonstrated 
with the trustees, who wished to make the discipline stricter, that the 
spirit of mildness and remonstrance and treating the students as 
gentlemen worthy of confidence " had succeeded so well that the 
faculty had no good reason to change it." As early as 1836, the 
following method of procedure was adopted. If there was a strong 
presumption that a student was guilty, he was summoned before the 
faculty to answer yes or no, but need not incriminate any other. 
If he said no, that was accepted as prima facie evidence of innocence, 
but if it appeared later that he had told a falsehood, he was expelled 
for lying. These students, though a little turbulent and high spirited, 
will not tolerate dishonesty in their mates. Anyone suspected may 
be asked, "Did you have anything to do with the affair?" and his 
yes or no is accepted. The college to-day " has supreme regard to 
the protection of the honor of the student and of the college." 

Other colleges having an honor system may be divided into two 
groups. In one, the honor board has no representative of the faculty 
and acts independently of it and of the president; in the other, 
the faculty are represented. At least twenty-three colleges belong 
to the first group. At Princeton, e. g., the honor committee is com- 
posed of the presidents of the four classes with an added member 
from the two higher classes, six in all. The recommendations of this 
committee to the faculty are usually carried out, even recommenda- 
tions for expulsions. Vanderbilt has an honor committee elected by 
the students but with no authority given it by the faculty. If a 
student is guilty of cheating he usually leaves the institution without 
appeal. Tulane has an academic board comprising the presidents, 
vice-presidents, and secretaries of each class which report their 



3i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

findings and recommendations to the faculty; and they are usually 
sustained. These are typical. At Lawrence College, Wisconsin, 
there is a council of four seniors, three juniors, two sophomores, and 
one freshman, with the president of the university club, of the 
Y. M. C. A., and the Y. W. C. A., which acts on all cases reported 
and regulates dormitory affairs. In the University of Mississippi a 
council of honor of fifteen members represents all departments. At 
the University of Georgia members are elected from the classes. The 
member who has served the longest in the board presides. There are 
secret sessions and a jury in cases of cheating. A defendant may 
conduct his own case or employ a lawyer. The faculty constitute a 
court of appeal. Beloit has an honor committee of nine students. In 
Washington and Lee there is a committee of nine elected by the stu- 
dents which acts as a grand jury, formulates charges, directs a formal 
trial before a jury of students which they select and which has power 
to act. Appeal to the faculty is possible but rare. At the Wharton 
School of Finance and Commerce, Pennsylvania, there is a similar 
system which applies only to examinations and only for the first 
year. At Washington and Jefferson College there is a system with a 
detailed constitution with power to dismiss, subject to the faculty 
if the appeal is taken to them. 

Somewhat different from these are statements that involve a 
pledge, like that of Simmons College for girls, which requires a state- 
ment at the end of examinations that no help was given or received. 
Amherst requires the declaration on all written examinations, essays, 
and orations : " I pledge my honor that I have neither given nor re- 
ceived aid." Violations are dealt with by a committee of six, the 
presidents of each of the four classes and one other junior and senior. 
The students of the University of North Carolina sign a similar 
pledge enforced by a university council, who may dismiss the student. 
The University of Cincinnati has a system of student government 
with a committee elected at large. Their duty is to investigate 
complaints, judge of the penalty and recommend it to the president, 
who usually carries it out. Cornell has a scheme of student 'control 
rather than an honor system in three of its colleges. Students may 
vote each year whether they will adopt the articles or not. The 
student guilty a second time is notified to leave the University within 
five days. If he does not do so, the case is reported to the faculty. 

In the above and in a number of other colleges the honor boards 
are composed entirely of students voluntarily chosen from the 
student body. The type in which the faculty are represented we see, 
e. g., in Hampden-Sidney, where the president of the college calls 
the council and brings matters to its attention. In the Pacific Uni- 
versity, Oregon, the council considers all matters of student conduct. 
This council is composed of four students elected by the student 
body at large and three members of the faculty appointed by the 
president. A similar organization regulates athletics, intercollegiate 
debating, and oratory. This scheme is now in its seventh year. At 



MORAL EDUCATION 3^7 

Wesleyan the honor system involves signing a pledge with a report 
of violations to the president, who appoints a student committee to 
investigate and report their findings and recommendations. For 
sixteen years there has been a conference committee of faculty and 
students, in which all the college organizations are represented. 

In Oberlin, while there is no formal organized honor system, the 
faculty and president are aided by two organizations for conference, 
one for men and one for women. In Trinity, there is a self-per- 
petuating senior honor society of seven or eight members which is 
a medium of communication between students and faculty in all 
matters of common interest. At Brown, while all responsibility as 
to honesty in college work is laid on the faculty, conduct in athletics 
is laid on the athletic board of the students elected from the three 
upper classes. At Bryn Mawr there is a self-government associa- 
tion regulating the conduct of students outside the classroom, of 
which every student is ipso facto a member, but the proctor system 
is relied on in classrooms and in examinations. Many institutions 
rely, as their catalogues state, largely on the sense of honor of the 
student without any definite organization. The student is invoked to 
meet the faculty with candor. There is a distinct understanding " that 
the students are responsible to keep up the moral tone " or tradi- 
tional high standard of college men in honor, manliness, self-respect, 
consideration for the rights of others, etc. Boston University de- 
pends upon " a fair but not too paternal oversight " and a wholesome 
public opinion among the students. The University of Montana re- 
ports a high standard of honor which is carefully guarded and pro- 
tected and especially affects athletics. 



The larger number o£ American colleges, nevertheless, are 
still governed essentially by faculty supervision. In several of 
these the honor system is reported to have been tried and 
broken down or been outvoted. Monitors and proctors are 
used. The faculty assumes all responsibility. Various rep- 
resentatives from such colleges report, however, dissatisfaction 
with existing conditions. Often classes request an honor 
system which has been tried for a time. At Dartmouth the 
students have twice discussed it, but each time decided that, 
however good it might be theoretically, it was not advisable 
practically. In a few cases the authorities of the college want 
it, but the students do not. 

Let us listen to its critics. The Dean of Wabash College writes: 
" Personally, I have been opposed to trying the scheme as I have 
never felt that it was desirable to turn over to inexperienced students 
the management or any other part of the college which is usually so 



3i8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

trying to members of the faculty, even after many years of serv- 
ice." President C. F. Thwing ^ while admitting that student self- 
government has lessened the antagonism between faculty and 
students, and has made an end of the old in loco parentis ideals of 
government, thinks love of novelty gives much of its charm to 
student autonomy. He holds that the machinery used is often 
" heavy and cumbersome and the process of its working laborious. 
Where self-government by students seems to be wise and easy the 
process is gained quite as readily by the efforts of the faculty, and 
in colleges in which governing is complicated the difficulty does not 
seem to be removed through its transfer to the students." The 
President of a Connecticut institution thinks a good many things 
may be dealt with advantageously by conferring with the students. 
But he says, " Of course I should be very far from approving any 
system by which the government of a college was in any sense 
turned over to undergraduates. This is and must be vested in the 
faculty and the faculty must show themselves competent to enforce 
the law by penalty when necessary. Professor L. B. R. Briggs, long 
Dean of Harvard College, in an article on college honor in the 
Atlantic Monthly, 1901, vol. 88, pp. 483-488, objects to the honor sys- 
tem " as nursing a false sensitiveness that resents the kind of super- 
vision which everybody must sooner or later accept and as taking from 
the degree some part of its sanction." The Secretary of Harvard 
College writes : " The so-called honor system has never commended 
itself to either the faculty or the students of Harvard College suffi- 
ciently to procure a trial of the system here. In the first place, it is 
evident that in any large and heterogeneous body of students such 
as is to be found in any large university there would inevitably be 
found a small number of persons whose honor is not to be trusted 
under any system. To Harvard students the responsibility for de- 
tecting and punishing the offenses of this small number would be 
wholly unwelcome. They regard the function of the college officers 
in supervising examinations as inoffensive and as a valuable guaran- 
tee of the integrity and fairness with which examinations are con- 
ducted. Moreover, it is believed that under a system which 
encourages students to believe that a signed statement at the end of 
their examination papers to the effect that they have not cheated 
puts them any more upon their honor than they would otherwise be 
is not calculated to produce a really fine sense of what honor is. 
Precautions taken by a university to insure the integrity of the 
examinations, like the precautions taken by a bank to secure their 
safety in cashing checks for the public, are valued by all honest men 
and are obnoxious only to evil doers. The presence of a proctor in 
an examination room not only tends to prevent cheating but it 
enables honest students to make legitimate communications — such 

. ' History of Higher Education in Arnerica, N. Y., D. Appleton & Co., 1906, 
501 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 319 

as borrowing a pencil, asking time — without the appearance of evil, 
a thing which all honest men wish to avoid." 



Thus it would seem that most institutions that have tried 
either the honor or self-government scheme, approve them, 
and this would indicate that it might be indefinitely extended. 
It must, however, be carefully adjusted to individual colleges 
and localities. No scheme will be found that every student 
will support. The spirit of honor should always be appealed 
to rather than detailed law ; and the reputation of the institu- 
tion should be involved. The system should have the hearty 
confidence and support of both faculty and students, and should 
not be a compromise measure. Its beginning, at least, and 
probably its working will largely depend upon some personal- 
ity; and discretion and patience will be needed for all. 

One of the great but rarely mentioned advantages of col- 
lege self-government, especially where the faculty is repre- 
sented on the student board of control, is the interchange of 
ideas, not only on the points involved, but in the larger field 
of intercourse generally between students and professors 
whereby each learns much about the other. It enables in- 
structors to understand and appreciate not only the students' 
points of view, but is a good school to teach them the nature 
of youth, while the latter learn by contagion from their elders 
to take larger views of college and of life. Better yet, and 
where the faculty are not represented and are not even a higher 
court of appeal, student self-government enables upper class- 
men and women to influence and educate the lower classes. 
Much of this kind of work must always be going on as the 
student classes come and go if any system is to succeed. Class 
and even department barriers are broken down and also fruit- 
ful topics of conversation take the place of trivialities that often 
mark the social intercourse of students. This is well shown 
in institutions for girls as well as for boys. Even the ques- 
tionnaires which have been answered on this subject by many 
students for various inquiries have been helpful, clearing the 
moral air and attracting serious thought on questionable habits 
and defining ideals of conduct. 

From this brief survey a few things are plain. First, no 
such scheme has to-day any perceptible influence against 



320 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

licentiousness, although chastity was the chief thing that true 
honor was meant by nature to safeguard. These codes rarely 
make any attempt to touch it save indirectly, and if they do 
so by direct means they fail. No student will betray lapses 
of his mates in this field. This even physicians and the con- 
fessionals conceal as if it were a sacred secret, and no spotter, 
tell-tale, or detective here would long survive the general 
opprobrium that all, even most of the purest, would mete out 
to him. The very nature of this vice is secrecy. The social 
penalties visited upon exposure are so severe that betrayal is 
rare, and few would be false in this respect even to their worst 
enemies. The same is true, though to a less extent, of drunk- 
enness, and perhaps somewhat less yet of gambling and 
plagiarism. Thus the worst evils to which sedentary student 
life is exposed are and always have been little affected by all 
the devices that make students responsible for their own and 
each other's conduct. 

Secondly, the best results are obtained against cribbing and 
cheating in examinations. Here student sentiment may be, 
and very often has been, so strongly enlisted that youth will 
expose their own companions, and public sentiment has often 
enforced expulsion with disgrace for this cause alone. This 
is partly because the honest suffer by relatively lowered stand- 
ing in all competition tests where fraud occurs. Stealing rank 
in scholarship thus is easily rendered unpopular and reduced 
to a minimum by rightly directing and placing responsibility 
upon the student body. This is really the chief triumph of 
the system, broadly considered. Now, while I am very far 
from condoning this form of dishonesty, two remarks are 
pertinent. First, the best examinations are those that render 
all dishonorable modes of helping self or others impossible. 
Where mere memory is tested this kind of fraud is easiest. I 
have long held that at least in my own subjects I can give the 
most effective test without preventing the student from free 
access to all other helps that his own most ingenious devices 
and assistance of others can render. This, at any rate, is the 
ideal goal of all examinations that test power, rather than the 
mere acquisition of knowledge, which all admit is the desidera- 
tum. The second remark is that life, e. g., in the practice of 
every learned profession and of teaching, admits all the helps 



MORAL EDUCATION 321 

of the kind tabooed as fraudulent in examinations. The cler- 
gyman, lawyer, doctor, engineer, professor, prepare with all 
available notes and special resources for the exercises of their 
own peculiar functions, success in which is the test the world 
imposes. For these reasons, examination honesty is always 
felt deeply in the unconscious soul of the student to be more 
or less a school-made artifact. Thus, while I grant that a 
genuine sense of honor may be cultivated toward such exer- 
cises, it is not the purest type in the best field of this noble 
sentiment. It is not wholly intrinsic, but when psychologically 
analyzed is found to rest partly upon loyalty to classmates, 
toward whom they must play fair, and partly toward the 
teachers and the institution. In and for itself alone, all aid 
in examinations will never be felt to be utterly disgraceful, 
but to contain more or less of a conventional element. Again, 
many if not most students who ever cheated feel in their souls 
that a test does not measure their real ability, and possibly not 
even their real diligence or training; at any rate, it does not 
gauge the real standing they will take in the world. I know 
the delicacy of this subject and do not underestimate the value 
and necessity of honest examinations nor the great value of 
what has been done here to develop honor, but I emphasize 
the fact that all that has been accomplished here is only the 
beginning of what is needed to purify student life and to give 
self-control to the best elements of the soul. 

A third result of this survey of student self-regulation is 
that the best effects in academic grades are seen where self- 
control has been a slow and spontaneous growth. The im- 
pulse to evolve this function comes from a certain ripeness to 
exercise it, indeed, sometimes comes as a reaction from expe- 
riences of the period of laxity and lawlessness. As students 
grow mature enough to govern themselves, they grow averse to 
the authority of adults, however subtle its forms. In nothing 
does the unwritten tradition, custom, spirit, moral tone of one 
college differ quite so much from that of another. These are 
as diverse, indeed, as the professional rules of medicine, which 
has its own ethical code, of labor organizations which have 
another, of lawyers, journalists and teachers, which are more 
unformulated, and of the army and military schools, which are 
most highly evolved of all (witness the stories of Nathan 
22 



322 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Hale, Samuel Davis, Major Wirz, the Dreyfus case and many 
a noble tale from regulars down, and of those who have pre- 
ferred death to treason). In all Teutonic lands to-day the 
soldier must sometimes choose between violating the civil 
code, which forbids dueling, or perpetual disgrace and social 
outlawry. All these codes are a product of slow and spon- 
taneous growth. With students, close watching challenges to 
deception, so that its very appearance is carefully avoided, 
e. g., at the University of Virginia, whereas conversely, as 
Woodrow Wilson says : " The truthfulness of men trusted 
grows with the trust." In some institutions, especially in the 
South, where the sentiment of honor is a more potent force 
than in Northern institutions, no matter how strong the evi- 
dence against the accused student, if it is circumstantial, he is 
asked to answer with a simple yes or no, and this answer is 
accepted as prima facie final and stands, unless certainty later 
shows it to be a lie. With too strict supervision, lying to the 
faculty may become a licensed form of flouting and ridiculing 
their authority. Brown University leaves even athletics to 
student control and its spirit ought to reenforce self-govern- 
ment and honor as does the military spirit. Unfortunately, 
here the tone that enforces clean sport has not yet been estab- 
lished, so that intercollegiate games can be very rarely in- 
trusted with safety entirely to students. Experience in this 
field, therefore, to-day warrants impeachment of student ca- 
pacity to govern themselves according to the highest ethical 
standards. If they cannot control their own games aright the 
question is inevitable and challenging whether they can be 
trusted in other matters. 

Fourth, the evidence from student clubs of all kinds and 
from secret fraternities is not entirely reassuring. True, 
boarding, debating, literary, dramatic and many other organ- 
izations have been created and well managed by students with 
no supervision, but in the conduct of these there has often 
been extravagance, and many of them have failed. In the 
strongest of them the cohesion and loyalty of the brethren to 
each other proves often far stronger than fidelity to the inter- 
ests of the institution if conflict arises. Few would implicate 
a fellow member in any offense against the college. " Blood 
is thicker than water," said one culprit. " I had to lie or give 



MORAL EDUCATION 323 

over a bosom friend to the public disgrace of expulsion. I 
would have hardly done it for any other fellow." Thus 
fraternity, e. g., in a secret society, shields evil doers. Even 
the matriculation pledge not to cheat which many colleges 
compel all students to sign on entering, is made void and the 
excuse that a coerced oath, perhaps from a non-juring con- 
science, is not binding is natural and easy, and upper classmen 
who always predominate on the honor committee and who 
would act justly toward a lower classman have sometimes 
failed when a chum is concerned, just as the bonds of friend- 
ship in later life often prove too strong for the laws of church 
or state. 

It is often said that while under a government that limits 
freedom in so many points to the adult as does the German 
state, academic youth have some excuse in abusing their liberty 
during the academic years, here in a democracy there can be 
no such pretext and liberty should be no greater than it will 
be found to be in subsequent life. This view, however, is 
partial, if not specious. Collegians here are not only suddenly 
freed from home and high-school restraints, but enjoy a 
leisure that will come to very few of them indeed again, for 
industry and business involve constraints often hardly less 
than servitude, so that the academic quadrennium is the heyday 
of personal liberty. Here, as well as in other lands, where 
the moral experience that comes from doing as one pleases is 
gain because repression even from self-control is escape, one 
who has not let himself go within certain rather generous yet 
exceptional limits when the spontaneous abilities are at their 
very best, lacks self-knowledge, for he has never seen him- 
self completely deployed in action and does not learn the 
true inner motivation of self-rule. There is a wholesome 
abandon in letting oneself out a trifle, not only to unlimber 
powers that might otherwise slumber through life, but to 
learn from personal acquaintance something of " the immortal 
powers." 

Pedagogy of Juvenile Crime. — Children obey their im- 
pulses and most of their misdemeanors are more mischievous 
than vicious, and hence they are very prone at a certain stage 
to commit acts which the law condemns, without the slightest 
criminal intent. Police systems usually show leniency by 



324 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ignoring most acts and selecting extreme ones for warning 
treatment. The playground with its outlet for physical and 
psychic energy has distinctly mitigated juvenile crime. Mod- 
erate poverty is usually a good school for industry, foresight, 
and self-control. For the Juvenile Court to take a child from 
its family has been compared to dynamiting a building to 
check a spreading fire ; and yet environment is vastly more 
important in many cases than heredity, for almost always 
when a child is settled in a good home by the age of ten, he 
lives out his life on or near its level, whatever his previous 
ancestry. Moreover, abnormal conditions in the environment 
are often easily discoverable and removable in each case; and 
luminous, too, are the now voluminous tabulated reports upon 
the effects of nationality, conjugal relation, occupation, hard 
times, drinking, poverty, disease, orphanage, bad hygiene, etc. 
Rarely ever is any one of these influences dissociated from 
several, and perhaps all of them contribute.^ 

The Boston law of 1906 was partly due to the fact that, 
in the language of the Police Commissioner, " the tide of 
juvenile delinquency is rising in Boston, and almost daily there 
is a new high-water mark." This law raised from twelve to 
fourteen the age under which children can be committed to 
the police station, prison, or State Farm, in default of bail, for 
non-payment of a fine, or any offense not punishable by death 
or life imprisonment. Children must not be called or treated 
as criminals under seventeen. Thus juvenile delinquency and 
waywardness are conditions, not offenses. Children cannot 
be convicted. Good conduct is assured not by penalties in- 
flicted, but by the certainty that they will follow offenses after 
assignment to the probation officer. Under this law parents 
may be held responsible for not having withdrawn their chil- 
dren from criminal associates or for permitting truancy. 
Where trials occur, the case is gone into at great length, last- 
ing perhaps hours instead of being disposed of in a few min- 
utes. Reparation plays a large role; and sincere regret and 

' M. C. Rhoades: A Case Study of Delinquent Boys in the Juvenile Court 
of Chicago. Amer. Jour, of Soc, July, 1907, vol. 13, pp. 56-78. See also 
Administration and Educational Work of American Juvenile Reform Schools, 
by David S. Snedden. Published by Teachers' College, Columbia University, 
N. Y., 1907, 206 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 325 

even apology and restoration of property after petty larceny 
are considered. 

After a struggle of centuries, the child is now a legal per- 
son with a status and with rights that can be enforced by law 
if necessary, against even its own parents. Not only do 
children no longer belong to their parents, in the sense of the 
old Roman patria potestas, which gave to the father even the 
power of life and death; but the modern court can compel the 
parents to exercise all the elementary functions of providing 
shelter, clothing, food, and schooling, can prevent them from 
forcing their children into gainful pursuits that involve 
jeopardy to health or morals. Officers of the State assume 
coguardianship, and offspring can even be removed from 
home at any age. The children belong to the State quite as 
much, if not more, than they belong to the parents. Giving 
birth and suck do not of themselves involve ownership, or give 
the right to impair any of the fundamental conditions of well- 
being. Thus the State assumes larger duties than ever before 
toward the child. It must see a candidate for good citizenship 
in every vagrant street Arab, incipient criminal, or invalid. 
For this large function, we are only in the reconnoitering 
stage, and are not yet quite prepared to formulate a detailed 
plan or a practical campaign. This must be prepared with a 
view not only to the welfare and maturity of those already 
born, but with regard to future generations. 

It must be confessed that the Juvenile Court has not in- 
creased but rather declined in favor in this country within very 
recent years. The laws under which it was established differ 
widely in different States. In some it is constituted as a 
regular criminal court under Common Law. The indictment 
is drawn as the State vs. Johnnie or Mollie; there is a jury, 
trial with counsel, bailing out, habeas corpus, sentence, appeals, 
etc. It is impossible, however, to do the best for boys under 
such a system; and hence it comes that so many decisions of 
the juvenile are reversed by higher courts, so that the profes- 
sional standing of the judges in the former is jeopardized, and 
perhaps permanently impaired — all through no fault of their 
own, but because of the anomalous position of a court based 
partly on Equity and partly on Common Law. As against 
this, in all such courts the equity principle should be made 



326 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

supreme, as it is beginning to be in a few State laws. This 
means that the judge can exercise his sound common sense in 
each case. He can not only exclude other boys, the public and 
the press from the trial so that those brought before him may 
be shielded from both publicity and notoriety as is usually 
done, but has almost unlimited discretion to vary his treatment 
to fit individual needs. The issue is between mechanical uni- 
formity on the one hand with incessant reference to precedence, 
and indefinite power to adjust to personalities on the other. 
It is the boy versus the system. The success of every such 
court, not only does, but always must depend very largely upon 
the personality of the judge himself, although it is hard for 
the legal mind to escape dominance of the ideal of a system, 
which any person can administer. It is plain, therefore, that 
we are far from having solved the problem of how to treat 
young delinquents. If we look solely at the offender some 
scheme of parole, probation, or guardianship is clearly best. 
But, on the other hand, if a boy slightly tainted is, under the 
system, allowed to be at large, he often infects other boys with 
whatever degree of viciousness he has developed. Hence we 
have two ideals in this country — one that regards the boy and 
aims chiefly at his salvation, as represented by Judge Lindsey ; 
and the other that looks first at the good of the greater number 
of boys who are in danger of moral infection unless those in 
whom the evil is smoldering be isolated from them, and 
whose interests may in some cases be best safeguarded if he 
is shut up. Again, age limits of responsibility, as established 
by law, are very wooden and noxious. A girl of fifteen, e. g., 
may be so wholly depraved as to demoralize a wide circle of 
boys and girls, being herself, it may be, steeped in vice and 
really old in its practice ; but, if the age of consent where she 
lives is sixteen, a young man whom she misleads for the first 
time, although he be relatively innocent, may suffer the severe 
penalty of being her corrupter and she go scott free, when if a 
year older she would bear all the penalty. The equity judge 
should look solely at the merits of the individual case and not 
be influenced by the superficial, arbitrary categorizations of 
classes of crimes and punishment, and should be emancipated 
from the letter of the law which may so easily work great 
injustice. 



MORAL EDUCATION 327 

The best juvenile court would be one that could be held 
anywhere, at any time, where the judge was, and as occasion 
arose. It should be a court, we may add, that if it were ideal 
and had accomplished its end, would never be held anywhere. 
But its agencies would be devoted to preventive work, which 
would be so effective as to eliminate occasion for trials. My 
ideal would be something like this: Let the judge and his 
helpers, including probation and truant officers, when ap- 
pointed in a community, first visit the schools, churches, boys' 
and girls' clubs, and tell the children concisely the substance 
of each city ordinance and law which pertained to them and 
which they might break unwittingly. Let them tell the rea- 
sons for everything the law prescribes and the end it was 
intended to accomplish, and point out ways in which it might 
be accidentally violated, and add the details of the methods of 
procedure : arrest, trial, disposition of the various classes of 
cases — all this could be done in a way to enlist the understand- 
ing and even the sympathy of every normal boy in the upper 
grammar grades in a way that would afifect his attitude toward 
law throughout his subsequent life. This kind of moral teach- 
ing by extreme examples of dereliction is just what not only 
interests the boys' liking for adventure, but vents it on the 
principle of the Aristotelian catharsis, so that they are more 
immune from temptation and also better informed. This 
might be done two or three times a year, briefly and concisely, 
as a concrete lesson in morals and in civic duty. If these incul- 
cations were enriched with examples and made a kind of clinic 
for juveniles, there is not the slightest danger, as old women 
of both sexes are prone to imagine, of infection unless the 
teacher is ignorant of the first principles of pedagogy and of 
insight and tact in dealing with children. Properly told, about 
every kind of wrongdoing may be described in a way to deeply 
impress and to deter. In the next place, each teacher or prin- 
cipal should keep a notebook with a ledger page for each 
child, entering its good and bad traits and acts. When it 
appeared from the record and observations that a boy or girl 
was drifting into moral danger, whether by the development 
of an innate tendency or by outer circumstances and associa- 
tions, or home conditions, and if the teacher or principal are 
not satisfied with what they are able to do in the case, then the 



328 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

juvenile judge or his officers should be invoked and each 
critical case turned over to him for such moral treatment as 
he deemed best after investigation. The fact that the boy- 
knew, although no others did, that he was under guardianship 
and could be taken into custody, would make preventive 
measures effective ; and the overt criminal act to which the boy 
was tending might be avoided. Thus in every school there 
might be a few clinical cases under the joint observation of 
teacher and moral officer. And the same help might be 
rendered by the latter to children from homes and even Sun- 
day schools, etc. In this way outside the school, home, and 
church, there would be constituted an agency to deal with 
exceptional children and youth before the age of full legal 
liability whom teachers and parents failed adequately to reach, 
and who might otherwise drift on toward criminality. Nor- 
mal moral children would know thus something about juvenile 
delinquency — how it was treated and regarded and why, its 
place in the civic organization under which they lived, as an 
intellectual matter; while those with wayward proclivities 
would know restraining agencies more intimately, having 
passed through one or more of the grades of correction : 
friendly advice, aid, warning, reproof, supervision, probation 
with duty to report at stated intervals, and hence feel the 
progressive surveillance and restriction of liberty which might 
lead on to residence in reformatory institutions of various 
grades according to the degree of defect, and the need of the 
apparatus of moral orthopedics. 

Why is not some such institution as needed and as practical 
as a department of hygiene, which abates nuisances, disinfects 
dumps, and removes dangerous patients? Its officers could 
develop many accessory functions, such as modes of tabulating 
all kinds of information, that experience might be utilized to 
the uttermost; more frequent consultations concerning very 
problematical children in the grades, as physicians consult in 
critical cases ; modes of investigating the moral surroundings ; 
methods of keeping tab, without overt espionage, upon boys 
and girls whose temptations to go wrong were increasing; ad- 
monishing negligent parents; finding volunteer guardians 
whose aid could be invoked for special children. They could 
also develop to a considerable extent such moral lessons as 



MORAL EDUCATION 329 

might be given to schools based upon the legal requirements 
and the infraction of laws. It would, of course, be essential 
that in this group of officials should be vested the power to 
penalize rather severely; and that they should, upon extreme 
occasions, exercise this power relentlessly and without appeal. 
There is in nearly every boy community a small group of 
toughs who presume ostentatiously, if not defiantly, upon the 
tenderness of their elders and also upon the mildness of 
penalties, very clearly understanding that they can sin with 
relative impunity up to a certain age, at the moment of attain- 
ing which this is replaced by severe penalties. These age 
nodes should all be graded away, so that punition should grow 
steadily and pari passu with inner responsibility. The penal 
code should be the magna charta of offenders, and its admin- 
istration should be so just that the boy who is punished should 
never feel that others more guilty than he escaped; for this 
implants a deep sense of enmity against the law generally, if 
not against society itself. The sense of justice, innate in every 
boy, is the very best foundation upon which to build the whole 
fabric of moral education. Its possibilities are now wastefully 
neglected because unknown, because they have been so over- 
balanced by excessive kindness, mercy, and indulgence. It is 
easy and lazy morality to forgive everything; but to act justly 
requires a far higher quality of both mind and will. 

Judge Willis Brown, next to Judge Lindsey, one of the 
most suggestive workers in this field, makes the helpful sug- 
gestion that in one or more schools in a city, moral instruction 
of a special and intensive kind be provided, and that children 
from all other schools who are in moral jeopardy or have 
truant or other dangerous proclivities be sent there. He 
would also have the boys in each school district organized as a 
city ward : hold stated meetings, elect officers, discuss such 
local civic and moral questions as they or their advisers deem 
well. This plan would bring certain of the best features of the 
George Junior Republic, Boy City, and Boys' Clubs into the 
schools. There could be a system of cities within a city, if 
each school were organized into a municipality, where ques- 
tions of interest to both ward and city were discussed and 
acted on in a moot way as they arose. Moral betterment 
should be the goal. 



330 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Now, in connection with this system, if each boy who 
should profit thereby were placed under some worthy man who 
lived near by and who could occasionally meet him, based on 
friendship and mutual help, in ways each pair could work out, 
there might be great gain.. In many of the best lands and 
periods of history boys have had, besides their parents, some 
mentor, godfather, guardian, or advisor with avuncular or 
uncle functions ; and good has thereby come to both parties. 
Upon unmarried young men especially, some such responsibil- 
ity toward one or more boys might be made a part of civic 
and social duty, as in the best days of Greece, where this sys- 
tem was so developed that it was a disgrace to a boy not to 
have some older male friend, protector or counselor. That 
later in a degenerate age this relation often became corrupt 
should not intimidate us from learning again to utilize all the 
good that might be attained by such quasi-paternal relations 
as all mature men, whether fathers or not, ought for their own 
psychic development to exercise toward boys. Even the fag 
as well as the tutorial system was only another expression of 
this form of mutualism between older and younger men. 
Beginning with boys needing exceptional care, the scheme 
might be extended indefinitely to others. Whereas the juve- 
nile judge with a genius for his work, like Lindsey, might 
thus befriend many boys in need, there are very many young 
men in every community who might assume more or less the 
care of one boy, and be themselves matured and morally 
strengthened by it. Aspects of this mentorship seem slowly 
developing in the Y. M. C. A,, the Epworth League, the Big 
Brothers' movement, and some other religious organizations, 
Plato deemed it one of the strongest of all incentives to virtue 
in these guardians that they felt that they must always set 
good examples to their charges and never let the latter detect 
faults in their character or conduct. As a foreschool for 
fatherly interests thus it would be beneficent. While for boys 
in the early teens, and even before, from the time when lads 
cease to be interested solely in mates of their own age and be- 
gin to long and tiptoe up toward adult companionship, and love 
above all things to be talked to as if they were themselves 
grown up, when they begin to recognize the existence of great 
questions above them, or grapple with the problem of how to 



MORAL EDUCATION 33'^ 

earn a livelihood, and what vocation to choose, it would seem 
almost as if they had a sacred and inalienable right in our 
modern communities to be placed in frank, confidential rela- 
tions with some man in addition to their father. Here we 
might realize again the almost lost ideals of antiquity, as ex- 
pressed by Aristotle and Cicero, which romantic love has 
thrown into the background. 

What immeasurable good, too, might come of such rela- 
tionships between mature women and girls during the most 
critical period of their development, who are sorely in need of 
counsel which they hesitate to seek from their mothers? 
Social workers are beginning to realize this and might develop 
still further a system of auxiliary helpers, mothers' assistants 
or coadjutors, and enlist an efficient corps of first aiders for 
those in moral danger, who would grow themselves for their 
care into more wholesome, richer, and all-rounded woman- 
hood, and be more insightful mothers later. Surely every 
girl, especially in the city, as she begins to bloom into woman- 
hood ought to have a foster parent or shepherd of her soul. 

Strange to say, there is no provision made at any university in 
the world for training juvenile judges, probation or truant officers. 
A lawyer or judge, already familiar with adult and Common Law 
cases, is usually by this experience peculiarly unfitted to deal with 
children. Vested with great discretionary powers, even to take the 
young from their parents from early infancy on, and place them 
wherever he deems best ; able to fine and even imprison parents for 
neglect, cruelty, overwork, etc., he is a rare man who can at the same 
time win, as he needs to, the confidence of both parents and chil- 
dren, so that the former will consult him as to the home discipline 
or the disposition of their own problematic boys and girls, and the 
latter will confess everything to him as a friend, upon his assurance 
that he will not use it against them or their pals but will forget it in 
his judicial capacity. Yet this ideal seems to be almost attained by 
a very few. The keynote here influencing boys tending to criminal- 
ity is justice. They respond to the very words " fair play," " on 
the square," " on the level," " an honest game," etc. A man with his 
mind charged with incidents of boys in moral peril, who have gone 
wrong, or been barely kept straight, who brings news from the fight- 
ing line where so many go down to moral death, who has genuine 
sympathy with boys, can influence them as pedagogy cannot begin 
to do. With these two equipments — sympathy and a wide concrete 
knowledge — such a m.an incidentally becomes the captain of boys, 
their gang leader, their hero or example, somewhat as the dog under 



332 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

domestication left the wild pack and transferred his devotion from 
it to his human master. 



Next, I would have the school, the church, and all the 
houses of detention utilize to the uttermost these born pedo- 
triebs as inspirers of virtue as well as deterrers from evil. Yet, 
while it is an inspiration to adults even to see these boy soul- 
compellers lead their flock about as the Pied Piper did the 
children and the very rats, they are prone, I think, even the 
best of them, to fall into diverse affectations; and because of 
their very power they often try to attempt if not the impossible 
at least the unnatural, so that when their influence is with- 
drawn, a dangerous reaction may set in. Some of these adult 
boy leaders, e, g., are overpietistic and seek to inoculate other- 
worldness at an age when a boy wants and needs to be most 
absorbed in this world. The Jesus as the church represents 
Him is not a natural object of devotion to the natural boy of 
twelve, and another life seems very unreal compared with this. 
Hence clever ways of smuggling in transcendental persons 
and influences, that we often see, are not the soundest peda- 
gogy. To say, e. g., " You are not giving Jesus a square deal 
if you cheat, lie, steal, etc., because He came down and suffered 
and died for us " — may be led up to in a way to produce con- 
siderable immediate effect upon a susceptible youth ; but there 
is something essentially foreign to boy nature in all this, and 
so it wears away, and the only permanent effect that results 
therefrom is often that the soul is rendered a little callous 
and immune to the infection of real religion when its time 
comes. So, too, such a mentor's collection of illustrative cases 
of virtue and vice may both be so extreme and exceptional and 
so far outside the boy's experience that, while their recital 
impresses at the time, he does not meet their like in his daily 
life and so their moral fails; or at best it all remains foreign 
and is not knit up into the texture of his most frequent 
thoughts and acts. Much of the subject matter of talks to 
boys is of goodness so very exotic and of badness so heinous 
that it remains in the soul as something rather foreign, like 
book talk or preaching. 

I would have moral instruction in the schools include at 
least a glimpse at the many interesting problems of juvenile 



MORAL EDUCATION 333 

delinquency in each city where a good social survey has been 
made in this field. 

For instance, in the city of Worcester, Mass.^ A. H. N. Baron ^ 
showed that in the preceding five years, out of nearly 1,500 cases of 
boys and girls who had in some way come in connection with the court, 
about one half were cases of stubbornness; and that of these most 
complaints were made by parents who, as the records show, did not 
know how to deal with their children. In other words, their parenthood 
was incompetent when the children reached the teens. Next came 
larceny with breaking and entering, thefts being mostly of articles 
of food and next of dress, though, in the winter, of coal ; and where 
money, or material that could be disposed of to raise it in pawn and 
junk shops, was stolen, it was in many cases to buy cigarettes with. 
What the law calls " malevolent mischief " is a very varied list of 
tricks, due often to exuberant animal spirits but sometimes danger- 
ous tampering with railroad signals, false fire alarms, and practical 
jokes. The " violation of Lord's day " is mainly by playing ball 
and cards. Trespass seems mostly to have been either playfulness or 
to have a hunkey or hang-out for a club. Vagrants are usually 
strangers who had stolen rides on trains. Other legal rubrics are : 
obstructing passage, throwing stones on the street, disturbing the 
peace, assault and battery, cruelty to animals, walking on the rail- 
road track, peddling without a license. 

All such classifications are not by motives. They do not consider 
the ordinance was violated by imitation, by special temptation, by 
playfulness, ignorance, or other motives ; but the standards are ob- 
jective and wooden. 

As to treatment of the various cases, nearly one fourth were 
fined. The fine naturally falls chiefly upon the parent and is essen- 
tially a bad system. Wherever there are enough good probation 
officers, and the probation system is the keystone of the arch in deal- 
ing with juveniles, fines are almost eliminated as are cases of second 
or third arrests, which here constitute about one third of all. Per- 
haps some who have been under surveillance are suspected unjustly 
afterwards for that reason. It is not quite clear whether such a 
system as prevails in Buffalo with a good corps of expert probation 
officers, who follow up all who have been brought to the attention 
of the court and released on parole or probation, or with suspended 
sentence, is better than the system of one paid chief probation officer 
who among business men finds sponsors who will take one or more 
cases to look after. Juvenile cases should certainly be tried every 
day and not once a week as here, especially as the older boys are 
shut up between the arrest and trial. All the years taken cognizance 

* Population 130,000. 

' In a Master's Thesis, Juvenile Delinquency in Worcester, Mass. Clark 
University, June, 1906, 33 p. 



334 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

of here are between seven and seventeen; the age fourteen halves 
the cases, there being as many before as after, and the last year 
being the M^orst. It would seem that better arrangements would 
make it necessary to send less members to truant schools and espe- 
cially to the Lyman School, which shows excellent records for those 
who have been there, but probably in part because many were sent 
who should not have been. 

Now my point is that these facts and the process of arrest, trial, 
etc., should be briefly described to all boys before leaving the Gram- 
mar School, if not indeed earlier, for several reasons: (a) the law 
does not accept ignorance as an excuse and quite a number of arrests 
occur every year of innocent boys whose violation was unwitting. 
Moreover, (b) the natural interest of boys in those who go wrong 
and the utilization of the lessons that come from this knowledge 
does much to clear up the concrete mind of a boy in regard, if not 
to moral questions, to what the community permits and what it does 
not permit. I see no reason why all boys should not be interested 
and should not be told a little about the Juvenile Court, the inde- 
terminate sentence, the probation system, etc. 

Hans Kurella ^ gives an admirable summary of Lombroso's theory, 
the kernel of which is perhaps his estimate that forty per cent of crim- 
inals are a special variety of the human race, to whom atavism has 
given unique physical and psychic processes. This means that their 
tendencies are innate and inherited, and that they have certain traits 
that make their type more or less unitary. Lombroso expends great 
ingenuity in showing that criminals among modern cultivated people 
do represent survivals of conditions common in prehistoric life; and 
he even traces the germs of crime down to the very anatomy of the 
primates and even to lower animal forms. On the psychic side, too, 
he finds atavisms characteristic of criminals in insensitiveness to 
pain, tendencies to tattoo, to be left-handed, hairiness, slight differ- 
ence of sexes, slight vasomotor excitability, and disvulnerability. 
This theory does not imply that all primitive races would be crimi- 
nals. It is supported by the moral deficiency of early childhood. 
From this view, it by no means strictly follows that born criminals 
are irresponsible. Those who know criminal psychology as moral 
pathology will hardly make this error. He believes the epileptic 
and criminal diathesis similar, and that both illustrate something like 
moral insanity. Benedikt is perhaps his most thoroughgoing pupil 
and holds that very many criminals are degenerates, as does Fere. 
Laurent and Corre have also contributed to this theory, which Dortel 
and Francotte have amplified theoretically. Kurella opposes this 
view, although admitting the great access of interest that it has 
brought into this field. 

* Naturgeschichte des Verbrechers; Grundziige der criminellen Anthropologie 
und Criminalpsychologie fiir Gerichtsarzte, Psychiater, Juristen und Verwaltungs- 
beamte. Stuttgart, Ferdinand Enke, 1893, 284 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 335 

Theodor Ziehen ^ in answer to the question, By what physical or 
psychic symptoms do we recognize in children during their first years 
congenital weak-mindedness ? gives a number of norms : for instance, 
the circumference of the skull at the end of the first month of life 
averages 36 centimeters; at the end of the first year 45; at the end 
of the second 48; of the fifth 50. He characterizes the micro- and 
macro-cephalic types of the cranial and other bones. Defects are 
matters of coordination, and to be extremely lacking in one respect 
some have attempted to compare with less variation in several re- 
spects. The writer then describes abnormal sensations and other 
physical signs of degeneration, both functionally and structurally. 
As for tests of intelligence, he would have them directed toward (a) 
memory, (b) formation of ideas, and (c) judgment or power of com- 
bination. Merkfahigkeit is stressed. Many children of nine or ten 
years cannot count higher than three or four. Number tests are very 
significant. As to questions, very much depends upon the form in 
which they are put; those requiring definitions are far harder than 
those that require distinctions. 

E. Neter - urges that most cases of transgression of law might be 
dealt with by less excessive methods. The right of the state to 
meddle with the family should be greatly increased. The deeper 
cases of juvenile crime are in fields inaccessible to criminal juris- 
prudence and are too complex and manifold in their nature to be 
solved by its methods. This fact impels us to a more intensive study 
of causes, in order to fight the evil at its beginning. Here, just as 
in medicine, prophylaxis becomes increasingly more important. Care 
for the young people and juvenile justice are not two domains but 
one, and both are vital problems of education. 

Otto Binswanger ^ gives a history of the idea of moral insanity 
from the time it first began to be regarded as an independent symp- 
tom group in which criminal tendencies were dominant or irresistible. 
The point was to prove that such disturbances could exist without 
any impairment of the intellect. Later the idea of moral insanity 
or imbecility was more sharply defined and it was required that some 
serious defect of the ethical feelings and ideas should be proven 
from the earliest childhood. The born criminal may be the abnormal 
phenomenon of the social organism, perhaps a peculiar anthropo- 
logical variety, but he must never be regarded as insane so long as 
there are no other signs of mental disease except moral defect. The 
criteria that enable us to decide with certainty between born crimi- 
nals and moral imbeciles, both of whom have defects in their develop- 
ment and perhaps antisocial tendencies, is the question whether the 
perversion is exclusively in the moral and aesthetic domain. Only 

' Die Erkennung des Schwachsinns im Kindesalter. Berlin, Karger, 1909, 32 p. 
^ Die Behandlung der straffalligen Jugend. Miinchen, Gmelin, 1908, 56 p. 
^ Uber den moralischen Schwachsinn, mit besonderer Beriicksichtigung der 
kindlichen Altersstufe. Berlin, Reuther, 1905, 36 p. 



336 



EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 



when troubles of development in the intellectual sphere or other 
signs of a morbid change in psychic processes are found can we 
speak of moral insanity or imbecility. Often the abstract ethical 
ideas are not firmly anchored to the ego and so are not a real pos- 
session of the individual and thus cannot influence his thought and 
action because they do not awaken the proper feeling tone of the 
self. 



CURVE SHOWING PREVALENCE OF CRIME 
AT DIFFERENT AGES. 













1050 

A 




















A 












816 
1 






/ 


' \ 


1 










A 






/ 




V 












\ 




/• 


4 
















7 






1 


\ 










1 


V 

488 








\ 


' 




/ 
















\ 






















V45 























2-15 15-1.8 18-21,2t-2B 25-30 90-40 40-50 60-6060-70 70 



Paul Pollitz ^ constructs the following curve of juvenile 
crime which he thinks typical, showing an apex at about 

sixteen, and then a decline 
as power of control and social 
restraint develop, with a later 
rise showing adult crimi- 
nality. 

Youth our Chief National 
Resource and the Need of 
Conserving It. — Among the 
demoralizing agencies, never 
so potent in the world as now 
and in this country, is immi- 
gration. Upon landing on 
our shores, foreign families 
find their dress queer and 
their language treated without respect. The fact of their 
being aliens is a disadvantage and, to the young, perhaps 
a badge of contempt and derision. Their children take up our 
new ideas and ways first ; and as the chief desire of the parents 
is that they become Americanized as rapidly as possible, the 
young lead the old and parental authority and respect for them 
is lost. If we revered the strangers in our country as foreign- 
ers respect American travelers coming from the better classes, 
all would be different. As it is, for a long period, during 
which often a million a year from the Old World have landed 
upon our shores, mostly from the ignorant and day-laboring 
class, the native Americans, young and old alike, have acquired 
a deep-down dislike if not contempt of foreigners as a class. 
This change and the larger industrial opportunities here con- 

' Die Psychologic des Verbrechers; Kriminalpsychologie, Leipzig, Teubner, 
1909, 148 p. Also one of the very best general treatises on the subject is G. L. 
Duprat's La Criminality dans I'Adolescence, Paris, Alcan, 1909, 260 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 337 

stitute the conditions which first attracted and now hold the 
ahen and make him wish to transform all his ways of life 
to the pattern set here, so that his previous habits, customs, and 
the social traditions that remind him of the fatherland are soon 
laid aside, with often religious and moral ideas as well, in order 
to facilitate the rapid adjustment to a new national basis. 
This is very hard on character. Travelers often allow them- 
selves great ethical license in things that home restraints for- 
bid. But for immigrants all old ties are abruptly and usually 
permanently sundered, and they soon become ashamed of 
ancient ways. The effects of transplantation have some 
psychological kinship to those of sudden emancipation for the 
negroes in this country after the war. Women, and especially 
the old women, are most conservative, so that this transforma- 
tion is often most pathetically hard for grandmothers whose 
dress, speech, occupation, social and religious life are so fixed 
and hard to change and thus often, instead of being revered by 
two generations in their own household, they lose influence 
upon their children and are perhaps flouted by their grand- 
children, who grow ashamed of their persistent old-country 
ways. In such cases the order of family life is inverted : the 
youngest lead and the oldest are in least esteem. The children 
translate, deal with tradesmen, bear the news, mediate between 
the old civilization and our own. The past seems more or 
less vain, if not despicable, and they grow conscious and then 
ashamed of its every memento. All this tends to be swept 
into a great maelstrom of oblivion, so that a fresh start may 
be made with a tabula rasa. Thus often we have both a social 
and individual regeneration or degeneration. Under this state 
of things, newcomers to our shores contribute nothing save 
their heredity and working power ; and the character and diver- 
sity of ethnic tradition, so precious a factor in the amalgam 
being here prepared in the great smelting pot of races, tends 
to be lost; and the monotony of Americanism, if not Ameri- 
canitis, swallows all these rich sources of diversification. As 
vestiges of this sort die hard, the races here tend to huddle in 
quarters, streets, settlements, in order to keep each other's old- 
fashionedness in countenance, and that reverence for their 
ancient ways may at least die decently with the generation 

that migrated. 
23 



338 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Now this is both pathetic and wasteful. Very precious are 
the ethos, nomos, muthos and logos of race. They are prod- 
ucts of very slow evolution and are the matrices in which 
character is molded. They fit the very strain and blood, for 
their psyche has been very exactly adjusted to the soma or to 
the very body and its diathesis, so that along with moral goes 
also mental waste and often in the next generation physical 
decay. Therefore, in this country we must count as very 
potent and beneficent all the recent efforts to conserve all the 
old household arts and industries which recent immigrants 
long to keep alive — all their family customs, tales, folklore, 
native myths, dances, modes of life, and even, to some extent, 
their customs of dress if these have no intrinsic elements of 
badness in them. All should make Scandinavian, Jew, 
German, Italian, Armenian, Teuton, and the rest aspire to be 
good representatives of their own stock rather than cheap 
imitation Americans. The Irish are now in certain respects 
perhaps least lacking in fatherland pride and esteem, for some 
of them would even revive their own ancient Gaelic tongue; 
but even they neglect many old industries and traditions and 
have turned their backs forever upon the simple ancestral ways 
of life as it was led at home. The same is true to a great 
extent of the Germans. 

On a foreign shore, the newcomer should idealize all the 
memories of what is left behind and be proud of his stirp, 
should magnify all that is good in it, and keep green its best 
memories. All these things their children should be told 
reverently and thus be taught to respect their parents and what 
has been sacrificed in changing abodes for them. Native-born 
children, too, should be taught the tales and history of alien 
races whose offspring they meet in the schoolroom ; and thus 
their interest and respect for their mates should be maintained. 
To this end each teacher should have sympathetic knowledge 
of the ways of life and viewpoints of the parents of each 
nationality represented in his or her grade. The Pole, Turk, 
Frenchman, Swede, who is loyal to his own land and proud of 
his descent, rather than the flabby, reconstructed specimen who 
apes all our manners at the expense of his own, makes the best 
American citizen because he adds something of positive value 
to the diversification of elements of which true Americanism. 



MORAL EDUCATION 339 

is only the higher unity. Monotonous uniformity and abnega- 
tion of traits inherited or inbred for generations is not the true 
American quahty and is very subtly dangerous for morals. 
Thus pageants, festivals, every commemoration of Old- World 
stories, music, march, float, dramatization, helps the continuity 
of development crossing the Atlantic, and contributes no little 
to establish virtue as well as to develop the intellect and the 
heart. Every vitalizing new touch of our immigrants and 
their descendants with the spirit of their motherland helps 
them to appreciate the best that is here and enriches our own 
national life. Hence these are soul-saving agencies, the great 
value of which is at length going to be adequately appreciated. 

The very essence of youth is moral enthusiasm. All the 
interests, dreams, and activities that distinguish it from the 
other ages of life are at bottom attempts to translate into life 
and conduct what the spirit of youth, to which all things are 
possible, really is and means ; and many perish because they are 
not taught and cannot find out the adequate and right ways of 
expressing what is in them. What to do with their super- 
fluous energy is their constant problem. They must and will 
enjoy, glow, and tingle with excitement in some form. If 
they abandon themselves to pleasure, they want all available 
forms and the most intense degrees of it; but the imagination 
which roots in sex and is one and inseparable with it is for a 
season plasticity itself. Youth fairly lusts for adventure of 
some sort and is capable of gallant, chivalric heroism. The 
sense of justice is exhibited, and his sympathy with the 
oppressed may bring him to enlist in desperate causes to punish 
those who outrage it. On the city streets we meet scores of 
eager-eyed youths and maidens who are in quest of something 
to do or be, who want to realize some ambition or, if not that, 
to get at life and feel it in all its breadth and depth and height. 
The very aspect of these young people not only challenges but 
almost smites and buffets us wiser grown-ups to do something 
to help them. 

To-day, let it be said with the utmost emphasis and re- 
peated over and over again, the spirit of youth is the one and 
only hope of this country, not to say of the world — only it can 
save us. If it fades, we sink into hard, grimy industrialism 
or ruthless commercialism or selfishness and moral material- 



340 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ism; and we shall be known to the world as the people who 
perished from lack of vision because youth, which means 
vision, was lost. Toward this most priceless of treasures our 
public sentiment is gross, our pedagogy purblind and helpless. 
Thousands of young Russians, Italians, Germans, Arme- 
nians and many more come to our shores fired with the 
highest instincts of reform and social regeneration. This is 
the promised land of their hopes, they burn with zest to make 
the world better; but not finding here the specific objects of 
endeavor they were used to at home and not being guided in 
making due adjustment, many of them slowly sink to apathy 
and indifference. Our very atmosphere of easy tolerance to 
all sorts of opinion and conduct is demoralizing. Perhaps 
they fight windmills, becoming rather absurd anarchists and 
atheists, not realizing that the enemies they fought at home 
are not found here. Full of Wertherian ferment, they lack 
the power of adaptation, which the refugees who came here 
from the German revolution of 1848 had in such a high degree 
and to whom this country therefore owes so much. The very 
spirit of unrest and disorder, which is brought from so many 
lands to our shores, if rightly directed, might be an agent of 
great good. Our land is a smelting pot of alien races, who 
bring here many types of nationalistic aspirations; but under 
our neglect and indifference, after a few years, our immigrants 
lose their conviction, their standards, religion, folk ways, and 
even the ideals and practices of their various home industries, 
and sink to the dull, monotonous level of acquiescence. A 
few of them, too mettlesome to submit to this process, despair 
and take refuge in suicide; but the great majority are taken 
possession of by the money madness which soon infects them, 
and find the realization of their youthful hopes only in ideals 
of sordid wealth, which in this country has such low and 
vulgar standards and which usually quite spoils the third, if 
not the second, generation by the slow process of degeneration 
that is usually at once physical, mental, and moral, which it 
entails.^ 

But, if the high aspirations of youth do here take on an 

1 See the admirable work by Jane Addams: The Spirit of Youth and the City 
Streets, New York, Macmillan, 1909, 162 p. 



MORAL EDUCATION 34i 

auriferous hue, let us remember that there are yet worse things. 
To dream of dominating the stock market for a day, of 
palatial houses, of buying elections and legislators, of automo- 
biles, boxes at the theater and opera, fine raiment, luxuries, 
travel and ease after toil — is better than not to dream at all 
and is surely preferable to open profligacy. To follow the 
counsels of our greatest millionaires, who exhort young men 
to work, live simply, save, and nourish a youth sublime, in 
anticipation of magnificent riches in the end with all the power 
it brings, is vastly better than to drift and dissipate by indulg- 
ing the lower propensities. But along with and far above 
this should surely go the passion for social righteousness which 
should be molded and given definite direction toward forms 
of amelioration and relief from industrial oppression in its 
countless forms — the checking of municipal corruption and 
corporate greed, the ruthless mania for pelf and power which 
grinds the life out of women and children who work, the 
vampires who pander to lust and debauch youth with drink, 
who adulterate food and even drugs, and prey upon the virtue 
of young girls. If religion which brought the Puritan and the 
cavalier — the one with his rigorous conscience and the other 
with his ideals of honor — is losing its pristine power, and if 
newcomers are prone to lose their national, social, and historic 
ideals beyond the hope of rescue by pageants and all the new 
efforts to restore and revivify their traditions, household traits, 
and family customs, and if even the ideals of democracy and 
the sublimating and magnificent concepts of self-government 
of the people, by the people, which brought one of the greatest 
sources of hope and confidence that has ever come to the 
human race — have ceased to be an inspiration to-day, there 
still remains one last resource, and that is the economic con- 
servation, specific, practical direction, of the ardor of the youth- 
ful zest for life, by finding tasks worthy their mettle for each. 
This, and not any expectation of definite, divine guidance or 
intervention or a purblind faith in national destiny could, if 
stored and turned into the right channels, sweep away at short 
notice most of the evils and dangers that threaten youth and 
society, and restore the family, politics, and business to a sound 
basis and give tangible reality to what is now too often wasted 
in flitting, iridescent dreams, in sporadic and uncoordinated 



342 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

efforts, in negative criticisms that condemn but cannot con- 
struct, and grow extravagant as they grow impotent. 

Our great national need, then, is a new interpretation or 
dispensation of the higher meaning of youth, that shall make 
an end of its present martyrdom by monotony, high specializa- 
tion of machinery and office work, by gaudy temptation 
flaunted in hours of relaxation, rest, and moral exhaustion. 
We need a theater that shall shape ideals, give standards of 
conduct, and preform choices, and a school curriculum that 
is rich in ethical interests, which is all youth really cares for, 
gymnasia that bring health, exercise, and excitement without 
exhaustion. We must take possession of the imagination 
during these critical years when it is nine tenths of life, must 
provide abundant social opportunity where the young can 
gratify their passion for being together in a sanifying environ- 
ment ; we must provide modes of exploiting for good the spirit 
of adventure which attracts youth in shoals from the country 
to the city, which is now in a stage of municipal evolution 
which is very dangerous for them, because we have not learned 
to purge our great centers of festering moral contagion. We 
must awaken the church and the school from their long apathy 
and ignorance concerning the deeper needs of the young, 
organize isolated agencies for helping them get together for 
greater effectiveness, set all, if possible, even the tainted youth, 
to work to rescue others, for this is often a way of salvation 
for them. Never was the higher pedagogy, which includes 
statecraft, family, school and religion, called to so high and 
hard a task — not in the days of Socrates, when the Athenian 
youth were exposed to some of the same deteriorating in- 
fluences, not in the days of Fichte, who spoke to the academic 
youth of the Fatherland and was heard by them as no one 
ever was before or since. 

With weakness of fecundity comes loss of a sense of what 
childhood and youth mean and need, and so in the face of this 
gigantic problem, the dimensions of which the wisest and 
greatest minds are now only just beginning to grasp, we have 
scores of partial and often trivial ways of solving the great 
problem of moral education enumerated above. The slightest 
of them are well meant and no doubt of service ; but all of 
them together are inadequate to meet the situation to-day, 



MORAL EDUCATION 343 

which is simply that of national survival and perpetuity in the 
largest and most comprehensive sense. Given the age of 
youthful idealism, yearnings and restless tension, charged with 
all that is worthy of survival from all past ages of man's 
phyletic history, an age when Nature dowers each of her chil- 
dren with their second and last great heritage of moral mo- 
mentum to do, be, dare, and achieve, as if she sought to vest 
each individual with the most and best that ever was in the 
race — given these, the only thing that is of ultimate worth in 
the world, the most precious and supreme of all things — what 
shall we do with it? The way this question is answered is 
the best test of an age or a nation. If it aborts and runs to 
waste, we perish miserably, if slowly. If it has full headway, 
is turned on aright, it has cleansing, purifying motive power 
enough to run all the agencies of betterment and to regenerate 
even moribund lines of endeavor. It not only brings the 
vision without which the people perish, but gives it reality. 
All this is possible and is the supreme duty of the present. 
Those who have ears, now hear the bitter, if unconscious, cry 
of youth in distress for want of guidance into better things. 
Our material civilization does not satisfy their deepest long- 
ings. The old oracles of the church, if not dumb, are hoarse 
and indistinct and too often disregarded by them. Their 
natural guardians are, some of them, asleep at their post and 
dreaming of old issues for which the present has no use; 
others are bustling and perhaps fevered with anxiety, or put- 
ting their faith in petty and very diverse devices, which are 
now utterly uncoordinated and thus add to the confusion. 
Social workers, who are doing the best actual work, are prone 
to be rutty, and to lose open-mindedness for the special fields 
cultivated by others. Thus we need a great synthesis of 
moral effort such as the world has never seen, to bring together 
all the real apostles of the new life — ^those who work and 
those who give — and to construct out of all the various ele- 
ments a national psychological and ethical enginery to conserve 
the resources of youth, prevent the present appalling waste of 
it, and to store the wealth of waters of righteousness that come 
so directly from heaven, and to canalize our entire social life 
that its streams may irrigate and refresh every part of it and 
meet every present need. The work to which we are called is 



344 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thus one of conserving the highest of all our racial and 
national resources and to convert arid moral wastes into fields 
teeming with harvest. This task cannot wait. The call is 
like that with which the New Testament opens — its tocsin 
words are now and here. The realization of long-delayed 
hopes, the averting of long-felt dangers must be accomplished 
at once. To do this we must call home our hopes for a far 
future, our desires for a distant good, and cash all their 
specious promises into immediate and present effectiveness. 
This makes great epochs, and the formula for little and mean 
ones is : Great plans for the future, pious hopes for all goods 
that are remote, and nothing here and now. Has any race 
ever had so urgent and imperative a call to do a present duty ? 



CHAPTER VI 
children's lies : their psychology and pedagogy 

Impossibility of attaining pure truth — Definitions of truth and lying — The 
lying passion in pubescent girls seen in the history of witchcraft — ■ 
Early spiritual mediums in this country — Felida X — The Creery Sis- 
ters — The English Society for Psychical Research — The Watseka 
Wonder — Contemporary instances of elaborate, continuous, and acted 
lies by girls — The childish errors of observation — Stern and Aussage 
tests — Statistical and other studies of lies — Innocent lies due to vivid 
fancy — Phobias of departure from exact, literal truth — Noble lies to 
save life and shield from discomfort — Make-believes — Pathology of 
lying — Palliatives — Its pedagogy. 

If every form and degree o£ lying were banished from the 
world and nothing but the exact truth were told and acted, 
and everything done were exiguously and literally honest, 
what would become of business with all its promoters and 
prospectuses; of all the new arts of advertising, so largely 
made up of seductive misrepresentations; of buying, selling, 
trading, dickering about prices ; of specious adulterations in 
drugs, foods, and drinks, and in manufacturing articles to sell 
rather than to wear and do service? What would become of 
many reputations so scrupulously groomed and cultivated, of 
many social forms, conventionalities, amenities, compliments, 
fibs; white lies, etc., so deeply ingrained in our very forms of 
salutation, if not in language itself? Where would be all the 
hypocritical enthusiams, the pretended knowledge, the affected 
interests, the fashionable likes and dislikes, the acted wealth 
by people really straitened, and the very forms of the bodies 
of men and women when fully dressed ? What should we do 
about diplomacy and politics? Oscar Wilde claimed that the 
love of truth was increasing so rapidly as to threaten the very 
existence of literature, which like art itself is shot through 
with lies, as Plato used the word. What would become of 

345 



346 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

most forms of religion unless, of course, it be our own, and 
in fact, of everything that mankind up to a few generations 
ago has held to and lived and died by, believing it to be very 
truth of very truth ? 

If utter truth means a loss of these, what a bald, coarse, 
cruel, monstrous, melancholy, stark-naked world it would 
leave us ! What pitiful figures all sorts of reformers cut who 
want to strip off every delusion, and even illusion which men 
need in such rank profusion ! A clever story somewhere tells 
the pathetic case of a man who tried to tell the precise truth 
for a whole day, and at its close found himself without busi- 
ness, or friends, a social outcast, and involved in endless com- 
plications even with his family. We can no more live on pure 
truth than we can breathe pure oxygen or nourish, ourselves 
with peptones only, for, like precious metals, truth needs some 
alloy. To be utterly and unjugglingly truthful always and 
everywhere is often heartless, if not brutal. A Hindoo tale 
tells of a man sent to hell for speaking the truth when he 
should have lied to save a life. The real truth is not merely 
the single fact or event mentioned, but the whole situation of 
which it is a part. No man can think deeply on the question 
of truth and falsehood without seeing the need of some 
thoughtful discriminations which are sometimes branded by 
the name of casuistry. Indeed, it is because our notions of 
truth diverge so widely from our practice that the vulgar 
theory of it has made it a wooden fetich. Were it again 
vitalized and brought into contact with life there would be less 
cant about truth by those whose life is permeated with false- 
hoods. There are hysterical gossips who must tell all they 
know, no matter what the consequences, forgetting that con- 
cealment of much if not most of the worst that we know, is 
often one of the very highest social duties. The formula of 
the legal oath to tell the whole truth applied indiscriminately 
everywhere would devastate society. Secrets for ourselves, 
for two, for a group, a fraternity, an army, etc., are virtues, 
and contribute very much to cement the bonds of true friend- 
ship. W. J. Kerby well says, " Our attitude toward truth is 
not a truthful one." Virtue must fit the situation, and the 
straightforward man not only states the fact, but conveys the 
true impression about it and its setting. To be false to 3, 



CHILDREN'S LIES C. 347 

lower, is sometimes necessary to be true to a higher, truth. 
Despicable as is the hypocrite, especially he of the sanctimo- 
nious type, the Pecksniff, Tartuffe, the sham pretender, the 
man or woman of dual life, amusing as is the shallow braggart 
who is at heart an arrant coward, e. g., of the Falstaff variety, 
the chronic and notorious liar whose word no one believes, 
nevertheless, there are noble lies that safeguard honor, save 
life and well-earned reputations, conserve public and private 
weal and great institutions, bury noxious scandal, and prevent 
impertinent intrusion into private affairs that are no one's 
business save those concerned. " Tell the truth, my son, in 
business, politics, everywhere, unless a lady's reputation is 

concerned, and then lie like ," said a world-wise father. 

It took ages to learn that honesty is on the whole the best 
policy in practical life, and who is there who does not repeat — 
and also violate this familiar saw? All, says an Eastern 
adage, are honest in spots, but no one, not even the sage, is 
so all over. There are gracious lies that sweeten, others that 
advance, and yet others that make life more efficient for good. 

From the great German alienist Heinroth, early in the last 
century, who in a ponderous treatise on insanity described its 
various forms as lies whereby, instead of accepting one's own 
nature, alien roles were assumed or subjective concepts were 
forced upon the environment, down to Janet and others, who 
conceive mental decay as loss of vital rapport with present 
reality, and to the Freud school, who interpret so many forms 
of psychic alienations as repressions of actual experiences and 
bring restoration to health by recall and confession not entirely 
unlike the way the Catholic Church administers confession of 
sin — psychiatry has repeatedly associated the difference be- 
tween sanity and insanity with that between truth and falsity, 
while the Protestant Church conceives conversion and regener- 
ation as sloughing off the false self and falling back on what 
God and Nature intended us to be in making the most and 
best of it. 

Nothing is plainer in most concrete cases than the differ- 
ence between truth and its opposites, and nothing is practically 
more momentous than this distinction often is. Yet there is 
and always has been the greatest diversity in conceiving both 
and neither has been nor can be satisfactorily defined. Re- 



348 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ligion claims to give us truth, pure and straight from its 
ultimate source. The chief quest of science is truth, and logic 
seeks to formulate the methods of both attaining and testing 
it. Yet pragmatism tells us there is no such thing as ultimate 
truth, but that that is truest, for either an age or an individual 
that works best. Hence truth is diversified, relative and 
changed with every stage of development, and we must ever 
be working over our ideas. Perhaps the most interesting con- 
temporary group of thinkers in the psychic field is now chal- 
lenging consciousness itself, which has so long been the oracle 
of philosophy, as never saying what it means, but always deal- 
ing with symbols that need laborious interpretations, the 
canons of which they are now attempting to evolve. To 
attain truth — exact, perfect, final — has always been the 
supreme quest of thought, but the old skeptical query is always 
recurring, whether there is any such thing, and whether if it 
exists our m.inds can grasp it, and if they can, whether it can 
be correctly expressed by language or otherwise imparted, and 
if uttered whether it can be received purely. If we accept the 
axioms of logic or science of to-day as truth, those who know 
it are very few, and over against them we have vast masses 
of honest ignorance, sincerely held superstitions and delusions, 
that criticism cannot expel. If moral educational practice had 
to wait on theory we might well begin this simple dissertation 
in antique wise with the fervid prayer to the muse of truth, 
Aletheia, for guidance. Happily, however, the treatment of 
this theme does not lead us to these altitudes, nor do we have 
to warp a weary way among the ultimate questions that 
underlie the quest for truth. We are seeking here only 
pedagogic guidance in the light of reason, and from recent 
studies of childhood and youth. Do our normal boys and 
girls all lie? If so, must they, and why? What is the dif- 
ference between normal and psychological lies? How should 
we treat the very many and diverse classes of violators of and 
deviators from truth? 

If we limit lying to conscious departure from truth, spoken 
or acted, when we know better, as is the popular conception 
of it which has too long sufficed for daily life, it needs but the 
most superficial scrutiny of obvious psychic facts and processes 
to show us how very inadequate this conception is. The fact 



CHILDREN'S LIES 349 

is that a fabricator of ideals, an artist, is often a creator of 
things that are not, and he knows it. The child in reverie 
believes, yet at the same time knows that his dreameries are 
false. He makes believe so much that is not so. How little 
there is in common between these often beautiful lies of the 
imagination and the denial by a child of its most palpable 
wrong deed to escape punishment, or in the lie of the hysterical 
who finds exultation in inventing a train of incidents on 
purpose to mislead or work mischief, or is fascinated by being 
able to look at black and solemnly swear that it is white, or 
asseverates that any whim or fancy that pops up in a dis- 
organized brain is objective fact! 

H. J. Eisenhofer ^ says that the definition of truth as the agreement 
of thought with being is defective because neither the ideaUst nor 
the realist can explain how thought can grasp being, which is so toto 
genere different. Truth is really giving adequate expression to the 
content of the mind rather than incongruence of the latter with 
outer things. Descartes made four rules to be observed in the quest 
of truth. The first was that nothing must be accepted which was not 
clear and certain. Logic is aided in its quest of truth by the principle 
of identity and contradiction. ^Esthetics comprise the feehngs or 
ideas of the true, good, and beautiful, etc. 

What is the feeling of art for truth? Lindner believed in an 
intellectual feeling which, as the result of a judgment, passed from 
the stadium of reflection which was more or less painful to that of 
conviction which was agreeable, and cites the joy of Pythagoras 
and Archimedes upon making their historic eureka discoveries. Jahn 
makes a special group of intellectual feelings which react to thought 
with the verdict true. Indeed, Drbal says that the sense of truth 
precedes and impels to knowledge. Krug thinks that it is a dim con- 
sciousness of the grounds upon which the validity of our judgment 
depends. It is a kind of divination or presentiment. Baerwald says 
that the case is like an awakened somnambulist who could not tell 
how he came to be where he found himself on awakening. Wundt 
calls intellectual feelings logical, but deems them very complex. The 
feeUng for truth is a strong instinct or guide and compass. Some 
think it gives us the power to apprehend and is superior to all forms 
of knowledge and understanding. But in general we have to deal 
with resultant psychic states. Love of truth is the mainspring of 
knowledge. 

As with all imponderables it is impossible to cultivate the love of 

^ Wahrheitsgefiihl und Wahrheitsliebe. Rein's Encyklopadisches Handbuch d. 
Padagogik, 1899, vol. 7, pp. 538-544. 



350 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

truth by direct methods. It has been said that there is but one 
virtue and that is truth, and but one vice and that is lying. One 
leads to Ufe and heahh and the other to destruction. If there is 
only one sin, even acts are sinful in just the degree in which the lie 
is found in them. Truthfulness is the very basis of social inter- 
course. Dorner thinks it is mostly justice, and that it arises from 
the idea of right. Natorp says it is a virtue of reason. Hoff- 
ding thinks that it involves a certain surrender as over against 
self-affirmation, and that between these two it must square with, 
justice. 

But we wish here to be practical and concrete, and so with- 
out further premise let us first glance at a collection of cases 
which perhaps illustrate the most diametrical opposite of 
truth, viz., the chronic diathesis of falsehood. Such cases are 
most common among barely pubescent or pre-pubescent girls. 
In many an outbreak of weird psycho-physic phenomena in 
families and in communities the precept should be, " Ne cher- 
chez pas la femme inais le tendron." 

The history of witchcraft in Western Europe, where the mania 
had a vastly greater development than in this country, brings pubes- 
cent girls into frequent and strange prominence for some two cen- 
turies and a half. We have here no space for details but can only 
point out a few of the most flagrant instances, such as the Throgmor- 
ton daughters, the eldest very imaginative and melancholy, with her 
mind inflamed with ghosts and witches, who felt pains and charged 
that a certain old woman who had once looked at her had bewitched 
her. Upon trial and torture, the old lady confessed that she had cast 
spells and caused the death of various persons, and she and her 
relatives were condemned to be hanged and their bodies burned, in 
1593. The Pacey girl, aged nine, fell lame and then had a fit, " feeling 
pricked and shrieking like a whelp," vomiting pins and nails. The 
pins were crooked and brought by flies. This was charged upon one 
after another until no less than thirteen were convicted and the next 
day the girl and her sisters were quite well. Occasionally young girls 
were themselves condemned, and executed as witches. The number 
of children involved, in fact, Mackay ^ tells us, is " horrible to think 
of." This was in England, but the same was true in France and 
Germany. In one case the devil was said to have taken the children 
to a gravel pit, conjured and performed with them, and beaten them. 
One girl swore she was carried through the air and when very high 
uttered the name of Jesus and the devil let her drop, but finally healed 

* Charles Mackay : Memoirs of Extraordinary Popular Delusions. Bentley, 
London, 1841, 3 vols. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3Si 

the wound which the fall made in her side and took her to Blockula, 
" The lying whimsies of a few sick children encouraged by foolish 
parents and drawn out by superstitious neighbors were sufficient to 
set a country in a flame. Some of the poor children who were 
burned would have been sent to an infirmary to-day ; others would 
have been flogged. The credulity of the parents would have been 
laughed at." In New England the witch mania really began with 
the young daughter of the mason Goodwin, who charged that the 
devil and Dame Glover were tormenting her. The theme was taken 
up by the two Parvis girls, who fell into daily fits. Where there were 
three or four girls in the family, they worked on the diseased imagina- 
tion of the others and things were worse. 

The famous seeress of Prevorst, Frederica Hauffe, daughter of a 
charcoal burner, though usually gay, had strange spells of shuddering 
as if influenced by things others did not feel. At the age of twelve 
she was sent away to be trained by her grandfather, a superstitious 
man, fond of visiting graveyards by night. This gave her chills 
and she was thought to feel the presence of the dead. Once she 
broke into his room at night and announced she had seen a tall dark 
figure in the hall and so her strange clairvoyant powers grew apace 
till she made a loveless marriage at nineteen and from her wedding 
day her health broke. She now developed her remarkable series of 
visions, sensitiveness to metals, crystal gazing, musical phenomena, 
finally saved ghosts from eternal pain by her prayers and became a 
minister to distressed spirits, hearing their horrid confessions and 
teaching them prayers essential to salvation. She spoke in unknown 
tongues, described the mysterious hereafter, detected obscure dis- 
eases, and finally her parents brought her to the famous doctor, poet, 
and visionary, Kerner, who regarded her as belonging to another 
world and became her impresario and her Boswell, writing a biog- 
raphy " of this delicate flower who lived on sunbeams," which is a 
record of mingled tragedy and illusion. 

A Methodist farmer named Fox had two daughters, aged fifteen 
and twelve. The house consisted of one floor with a cellar and loft. 
March 31, 1848, the Fox family went to bed early, having been dis- 
turbed by strange noises, the girls sleeping in another bed in the same 
room. Raps, at command, rapped sound for sound the noises the girls 
made by snapping their fingers, in ways which showed intelligence. 
The news spread and there was great agitation. Parents and visitors 
asked questions and raps answered. A rumor was revived that a 
previous tenant had heard knockings and other noises and it was 
immediately supposed that this was the work of ghosts. In answer 
to questions raps indicated that a man had been formerly murdered 
for five hundred dollars and buried in the cellar, and there was a ru- 
mor that digging had revealed teeth, bones, and a broken bow. The 
age of nearly all the neighbors was correctly rapped, the number of 
children, and deaths. Later one Fox girl went to Rochester and the 
other to Auburn and in both places tiptomania broke out. An older 



352 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

married daughter became a medium. Podmore * says there were soon 
some two hundred families where such phenomena broke out in Ohio 
and a hundred mediums in New York that met private circles. In 
1851 three physicians investigated and reported that the noises could 
be made by movements of the knee joints. With the feet wide apart 
and on cushions and the legs straight there were no raps, nor were 
there when the knees were tightly held. It developed that various 
people could make similar raps by the toe joints, that the raps were 
better if the feet were warm, etc. The younger Fox sister is said to 
have explained that if her foot was at the bottom of the door the 
raps would be heard at the top if she looked at the top, and to have 
admitted that she made them with her toe joints and could make 
them with both knees and ankles. One of the sisters gave a public 
demonstration of how the raps could be produced, but this was after- 
wards denied or recanted. 

In 1852 an Ohio farmer named Koons, finding his eight children 
gifted, built a log cabin equipped with spirit instruments, where 
strange physical manifestations occurred ascribed to a large band of 
pre-Adamite men and women. ^ 

A Connecticut clergyman married a widow with' four children, a 
girl sixteen, a boy eleven, and two younger, and soon wondrous dis- 
turbances broke out. In an attic were found eleven " figures of an- 
gelic beauty which were really dolls in attitudes of devotion, and these 
were thought to have been mysteriously constructed." Once, alone in 
his study, turning his back, the old gentleman found his writing paper 
covered with hieroglyphics. Chairs were moved, missiles thrown 
through the glass, letters were written without hands, the boy was 
hung on a tree, the girl was tied, forks bent, warm hands felt under 
the table. A. J. Davis investigated and found the raps due to " vital 
electricity " discharged from the older boy. One investigator after 
violent rappings and throwings sprang to the room of the sixteen- 
year-old girl and found her in bed but nervous, palpitating, and with 
a very red face. When the boy went to school the spirits tore his 
books and tore his clothes. The disturbances all centered about the 
older boy and girl. The spirit of mischief often seemed to take 
possession of them. 

The history of the earlier days of spiritism in America is a very 
sad one. In scores of houses there were strange doings, spirit mes- 
sengers, often hoaxes and fiction. Our country was then sparsely 
populated and this and the character and amount of popular educa- 
tion and the absence of intellectual centers caused a great deal of 
crude but vigorous thinking and many a strange, weird movement. 

A young daughter of Judge Edmunds rather suddenly became a 

1 Frank Podmore: Modem Spiritualism; a History and a Criticism. Methuen, 
London, 1902, 2 vols. 

=* H. Addington Bruce: The Riddle of Personality. Moffat, Yard, N. Y., 1908, 
p. 247. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 353 

medium, speaking several languages. There was weird music, to 
which spirits sometimes beat time by raps; clothing, hair, and beard 
were tweaked, bells rung, and the religious sense was so strong that 
everything was given a supernal interpretation. In 1873 some young 
boys who had read a book entitled " The Medium and Daybreak " 
held a dark seance, one of them falling into a trance and writing 
poetry in mirror script from Thomas Campbell. This and his bab- 
bhng, ascribed to a great Indian medicine man, were accepted, as was 
a farewell to earth by Poe. A girl of thirteen saw a child in a white 
pinafore running along the hall without sound of footsteps. In 1883 
Podmore tells us of a servant girl of sixteen, the daughter of an inva- 
lid mother, who caused all sorts of things to fly about the room, fall 
downstairs or jump about, leap into the fire, go into the air and fall. 
After a good deal of superstition, when this girl departed all these 
phenomena ceased. In 1894 at Durweston, England, many spirit phe- 
nomena centered about a consumptive hysterical girl of thirteen. In 
Arundel, in 1884, there were strange scratches, messages, movements, 
images, antics of the clock, centering about another girl of thirteen. 
In Berkshire, in 1895, a girl of twelve with weird, uncanny look, did 
many tilings, pretending to look in another direction and always deny- 
ing everything, but was finally detected in a long series of wild per- 
formances. A Shropshire girl of thirteen, who had made many things 
move and hang apparently unsuspended and who used to cry out that 
an old lady was choking her, finally confessed and showed how she 
carried out her performances. Another tall, pale girl of twelve, in 
the south of England, who had outgrown her strength, caused a good 
deal of popular excitement, saw all sorts of strange things, was 
bound, beaten, caused spirit touches and thumps. Podmore enumer- 
ates eleven such cases. Bruce, in his " Historic Ghosts and Ghost- 
Hunters," New York, 1908, made a study of the well-known story 
of the drummer of Tedworth, whose ghost was supposed to have re- 
turned to punish those who had maltreated and played all kinds of 
tricks on him, and concludes that the root of all the disturbances 
was a girl of ten and her sister, since wherever there were scratches 
and raps these naughty juveniles were found near, chuckling at their 
mischief, which many thought so mysterious. In this case they did 
not cause the first outbreak of the excitement but caught the spirit 
of it. Bruce also thinks that the mysterious events at the home of 
the father of the famous Wesleys, which began with blood-curdling 
groans and terrific knockings, until outsiders were invoked to lay 
the ghost, all centered about some of his seventeen children, who 
gobbled, broke glass, and made noises like money. This Bruce thinks 
centered in the third girl, sprightly, gay, vivacious, precocious, 
nocturnal in her habits, whose tremblings when her room was sud- 
denly entered by people with pistols may only have been suppressed 
laughter. She had a passion for scribbling and later became a 
poetess. The famous ghost of Cock Lane, too, owed most of the 
reality it ever possessed to the daughter of a clerk, aged twelve, who 
24 



354 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

brought disaster and disgrace to a most worthy man by playing upon 
the superstitions of the people from an uncontrollable hysterical im- 
pulse. 

Felida X./ of Bordeaux, was normal till thirteen, and since then 
really educated Taine and Ribot and furnished the chief arguments 
against the Cousin school of philosophy. But for her, Janet says, 
there would have been no chair of psychology at the College de 
France. She showed hysterical symptoms and periodically fell into a 
trance, emerging with a new personality. The second Felida was a 
marked improvement over the first, who was doleful, fretful, and glum, 
while after the trances she became vivacious. In the second state she 
remembered all of both, but in the normal she knew nothing of the 
second condition. At fifteen she came to Azam, who tried in vain 
to check her crises. She really cured herself in the end, for the 
second state got command over the first till the latter rarely appeared 
and she became a new woman. Only once when she lapsed into the 
first state was there a loss of memory for the occurrences of the now 
long period. She then ignored the dog, her household arrangements, 
social duties, etc., so that when she felt an attack coming on she 
wrote letters and gave in advance full instructions as to her social 
affairs, in order to bridge the gaping memory. Azam found her, in 
1858, and in 1887 she was married, a happy mother, and constantly 
in the second state, save for half a dozen lapses a few hours at a 
time per year. 

Marcelline from the age of thirteen suffered from hysteria and 
chorea until at last vomiting supervened and death seemed imminent 
from exhaustion. When Janet hypnotized her he produced a somnam- 
bulic state in which she could both eat and digest and her weight in- 
creased, but she could eat only when hypnotized. After leaving the 
hospital, she soon became as bad as ever, but Janet finally succeeded 
in establishing her second personality, in which she not only recovered 
but passed an examination she failed to do in the normal state. 

In the first volume of the " Proceedings of the Society for Physical 
Research" (1882, p. 20), Professor Barrett introduces the five Creery 
girls, between the ages of ten and seventeen, " all thoroughly healthy 
and as free as possible from morbid or hysterical symptoms and in 
manner perfectly simple and childlike." The father was a clergy- 
man " of unblemished character," who had often experimented with 
telepathy on his daughters and " a young servant girl." These sisters 
thenceforth played an important role in the " Proceedings " of the 
English Society and were thought to have remarkable mind-reading 
powers. Many seances were held with them by diverse savants 
which in the " Proceedings " of the society occupy a large place dur- 
ing the next five years. At the close of the volume of " Proceedings," 
June, 1888, appears a note stating that the Creery girls had been de- 

' E. Azam: Double Conscience, 6tat actuel de Felida X. Impr. de Chaix, 
Paris, 1883. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 355 

tected in collusion, not only when two of the sisters were acting as 
agent and participant, but that an auditory and visual code had been 
used when one was a mere spectator, that the third sister had " con- 
fessed to a certain amount of signaling," and Mr. Gurney, while sus- 
pecting that the signals had been used far more than had been discov- 
ered and had been developed before the sessions, again regrets that 
precautions were not more stringent, and rather tenderly says that the 
girls probably " feared that visitors would be disappointed." Hence- 
forth the very name of these girls seems to be eschewed from all the 
writings of this Society. It would be very interesting to a psycholo- 
gist to know far more than we are told about this exposure and con- 
fession, when it was begun and whether the girls grew up to be 
" thoroughly healthy and normal." We seem here to have a case 
where girls in the early teens developed and indulged the passion 
for deception under conditions where great men and themes were 
involved which would seem calculated to bring home a sense of 
seriousness and honesty to all those capable of these sentiments, but 
the personal motives to deceive were too strong to be overcome even 
under these conditions. Fortunately the Society had the courage to 
go on its way with other subjects and other themes. There is no 
evidence that their belief in telepathy was much shaken, nor their 
sense of the subtlety of the passion for deception was very much 
deepened. Among the lessons to be drawn from this case is that 
much moral responsibility is involved in using maidens at this seeth- 
ing and susceptible age to demonstrate supernal powers. Probably 
few conditions involving stronger temptation to mislead can be con- 
ceived. 

The Watseka wonder was too much for Hodgson, the Sherlock 
Holmes of psychic research. Lurancy Vennum, aged thirteen or 
fourteen, eighty-live miles south of Chicago, July, 1877, sitting with 
her mother, fell unconscious and stayed so five hours. She did so 
again the next day, but while insensible to all about her began to say 
she was in heaven, describing spirits who had died. Her pious par- 
ents thought her fits trances. They lasted from one to eight hours and 
sometimes occurred several times a day. Physicians could not help 
and in 1878 she was about to be sent to an insane asylum, when an 
unknown neighbor appeared, a spiritualist named Raff. He had a 
daughter long dead who had had about the same symptoms and had 
been a supernatural clairvoyant, who had also been deemed insane but 
whom Raff thought a sound victim of spirit infestation. A spiritist 
doctor, Stevens, was called, and found the girl doubled up, looking like 
a hag and ugly, calling her father Old Black Dick and her mother Old 
Granny. She was silent, but was interested when she found Stevens 
was a spiritual doctor. She vowed her name was Katrina Hogan, 
aged eighty-six, and that she had come from Germany through the 
air three days before. Then quickly changing, she said she had lied, 
and was really a boy, Willie Canning, who had died, and is here be- 
cause he wants to be. Finally she threw up her hands and fell in a 



356 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

cataleptic fit. The doctor magnetized her and found that she was no 
longer on earth but in heaven surrounded by better spirits. The doc- 
tor suggested that she could be controlled by one who would keep 
away the evil ones and she announced that she had found one on 
earth, Mary Raff. This her father welcomed greatly. Lurancy slept 
well that night but thereafter was Mary Raff, not recognizing father 
or mother but demanding to be taken to the Raff house, calling Mrs. 
Raff " Ma " and a married sister " Nervie," hugging and kissing 
them and whispering allusions to past events. To her parents this 
seemed a new phase of the insanity, but the Raffs had no doubt that 
this was the real incarnation of the girl they had buried twelve 
years before. On the way to the Raff house, crossing the entire city, 
she turned into the house where the Raffs used to live when she 
died, and when forced to go on to their new home identified many 
objects and told the Raffs that the angels would let her stay some 
time. She was now entirely well, had forgotten her life as Lurancy, 
but remembered everything connected with Mary's career. She knew 
she was masquerading in a borrowed body and described where Mary 
was buried. She stood most tests such as recognizing a hat that Mary 
wore and a collar. She performed a few clairvoyant stunts and re- 
mained with the Raffs for more than three months, enacting with 
great fidelity the new role. But in May she told Mrs. Raff in a 
broken voice that Lurancy was coming back. She glared about, cried, 
" Where am I ? I was never here before ; want to go home." Then 
she became Mary Raff again for several days, lapsing back into 
herself. On the road there were sharp interchanges of personali- 
ties. Now she would weep at leaving her father and then call him 
Mr. Raff. On returning home she was healthy and normal, com- 
pletely cured, the Raffs thought, by their daughter. Dr. Stevens 
wrote the case up from the spirit standpoint. Mr. Raff vowed it 
was true and that he was an honest man, as he seems to have been. 
In this state of things Hodgson arrived, April, 1890. Lurancy had 
married and gone to Kansas. She was now a strong, healthy woman, 
although for a time there were occasional returns of Mary's spirit; 
but this had ceased. She married a skeptic and had not developed, 
which her father regretted. Hodgson concluded " the case to be 
unique among the records of supernormal occurrences," and said he 
" could not find any satisfactory explanation of it except the spirit- 
istic." 

N. Kotik ^ experimented on a girl, Sophie, of fourteen, in southern 
Russia, of mixed blood, delicate and of neurotic family, who with her 
father had given public exhibitions of thought transference. When 
the author controlled and varied these experiments, the father was 
requested to stand five paces behind the girl, whose eyes and often 
whose ears were stopped, while he was allowed to make no sound or 

^ Die Emanation der psychophysischen Energie. Bergmann, Wiesbaden, 1908, 
130 p. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 357 

movement. He, nevertheless, communicated to her w^ords written 
by bystanders and shown to him. Again, he would write and think 
words which she would repeat, nearly always correctly. The same 
occurred if the father and daughter were in different rooms, each 
holding a wire that passed through a keyhole. In another series of 
experiments, a schoolgirl of eighteen, Lydia, answered questions 
thought of but not spoken. Those questions were often quite definitely 
answered, usually by spelling out the responses by moving a pointed 
cardboard to letters before her in a light so dim that others had diffi- 
culty in distinguishing them. Lydia also described postal cards that 
only the agent saw, as she also did mental images which others 
called up; and letters from the agent's friends were partly repro- 
duced or answered. 

These observations suggested to Kotik the experiments of the 
French physiologist, Charpentier (C. R. Soc. de Biol., 1904, 12-19. 
Also Bordier, Les Rayons N., 1905, p. 76) that active brains ema- 
nated dark rays, somewhat akin to Blondot's N. rays, although 
specifically different from these which, although dark themselves, 
caused a phosphorescent screen on which they fell to glow dimly. 
These rays were not thought by Charpentier to be connected by 
thought transference ; and most now deem their effects upon the 
screen due to autosuggestion. Kotik, however, concluded from fur- 
ther experiments upon such a screen as Charpentier had, that brains 
emit such rays when in action, not when at rest, that affect a phos- 
phorescent screen ; but he believes that we have here the real agent in 
thought transference, that psychophysic emanations are emitted al- 
ways and by all, and that in cities and crowds the air is literally and 
physically saturated with them, and that they modify the conscious- 
ness of all, although in vastly different degrees. Impinging upon 
very sensitive brains of others, they cause them to reconstruct similar 
moods and even images. They almost annihilate the individuality 
of sensitive, mediumistic percipients who are but slightly protected 
from the influence of other brains, influences from which may pos- 
itively infect them. Thus the phrase that ideas are in the air is 
literally true. Psychophysic energy, we are told, can be conducted 
from the agent to the ground by a wire, so that a telepathic message 
does not reach the agent. It comes most abundantly from the un- 
conscious regions and flows over to the extremities, e. g., the hands, 
on which it accumulates ; as also it may pass to blank paper clinging 
about it for some time, and can thus be interpreted by a percipient. 
It is hard for it to penetrate closed doors and other obstacles, and 
other objects are obstructive in different degrees. 

It need hardly be added that any experiments like these must be 
regarded as utterly inconclusive, since the writer has little conception 
of the many modes by which such transferences as he describes may 
be conveyed. His precautions, therefore, seem utterly inadequate. As 
to his experiments with N-rays, they fall no less short of the accuracy 
which should mark the work of science under controlled conditions. 



35^ EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

P. A. M. Richard's thesis ^ consists largely in the description of 
pathological cases. He shows the proneness of hysterical women to 
fly in the face of truth. Theirs, however, are pseudo lies, if they re- 
sult from dreams, delusions, troubles of conscience, external sugges- 
tion or perturbations of memory or personality. Hysterical patients 
can, however, truly lie, although their mendacity may be a vent and 
perhaps a relief for their malady. The vice is due, in such cases, to 
psychic feebleness, puerility of character, and mental ataxia. This 
habit may have the gravest consequences for friends, and complaints 
must be carefully analyzed. Such patients cannot be held entirely 
responsible for their falsehoods, and their testimony in court has 
slight value. 

A. Delbruck ^ has given us an anthology of almost classical cases 
of psychopathic lies; and shows in cases where falsehood and delusion 
are combined that complete responsibility before the law is impos- 
sible. Often the beginnings of this perversion are seen in slight 
deviations on trifling things, and pass gradually to diametrical con- 
tradictions concerning the most vital and essential matters. Many 
swindlers have been partially sincere, and some of the insane, who 
were subject to the most perverse hallucinations, often show signs 
of incomplete credence in them. Where conviction is attained it is 
often not of the calm stable kind. Pseudologia phantastica has many 
literary representations to which this author refers. In some states 
of consciousness it is possible to really lie, and yet to do so in per- 
fect good faith. Whenever the power of reproduction weakens and 
fancy increases in strength, we have this type of degeneration. 
Thieves are perhaps the most artistic and dexterous liars. Those 
who commit violent crimes lie in a clumsy way. Very often experts 
seem to lose all sense that they are lying, even in the very act of 
doing so, for it has become complete second nature. It is very often 
difficult to distinguish between insanity and simulation. In the best 
of Sully's works — that on illusion — he shows how akin it is to error, 
and how commonly we are deceived by our own experience. Yet 
there are some who persist in lies despite the fact that at the same 
instant they have a keen sense of their falsity. In mania there is 
often a strange mixture of truth and poetry which breaks up on 
slight examination. Kraepelin has cited many cases of illusions of 
memory which were interpreted as falsehoods, and some of which 
vanished under slight criticism. They sometimes coexist with clear 
judgment. They can be produced by retroactive hallucinations. 

Gobelbecker (Zeits. f. exper. Padagogik, 5. Bd., S. 50) gives an 
interesting case of the harmless play of childish fancy, which he 
compares to blowing soap bubbles and with abnormal self-deception 

^ Le Mensonge chez la femme hysterique. (These med.) Y. Cadoret. Bor- 
deaux, 1902, 66 p. 

^ Die pathologische Liige und die psychisch abnormen Schwindler. Enke, 
Stuttgart, 189 1, 131 p. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 359 

or pathological imagination ; and concludes that the factor of religion 
is the chief one for the cultivation of the phantasy.^ 

A. Pick - describes two interesting cases of pathological dreamery 
with hysterical symptoms. First, a girl of eighteen suffering with 
delusions of greatness, who thought herself an empress, etc. Some- 
times the reality of her illusions seemed to be open to question; but 
usually they persisted and were strongly developed in her letters. 
The other case is that of a twenty-year-old servant girl, who had suf- 
fered from a sexual attempt at the age of fourteen. She was found 
tied and told a story in detail, which was later doubted. This patient 
wrote love letters and sent them to herself. In one she described her- 
self as located in the forest, and when she received the letter, went 
there at once, ran about weeping as if expecting to see her lover, and 
coming home complained to her mistress that he had assaulted her. 
She thought she deserved punishment ; and evenings on going to bed 
saw herself tied with chains and imprisoned. 

The following cases illustrate a very different and, on the 
whole, less abnormal class of cases : 

Two German immigrants in New York brought up their daughter, 
born here, on a diet of literal truth, and tabooed fiction, poetry, and 
imagination as lies. She was bright, at twelve had never read a fairy 
tale or a story book, but was constitutionally dreamy and ardent- 
souled, with a great passion and talent for music. Her mother once 
told her she might perhaps sometime play to the President. Soon 
after, at the dedication of Grant's tomb, she saw Mr. and Mrs. 
McKinley, and one day rushed in breathlessly, saying that they 
had visited her school, heard her play, might adopt her, would give 
papa a place in Washington, etc. ; but Mrs. McKinley was out of 
funds and her husband was in Washington. Accordingly, Gertrude's 
father drew a hundred dollars from his fortune of fourteen hundred 
in the bank and sent it by his daughter, who brought back costly flow- 
ers. Upon more excuses, more money was loaned, and more presents 
were sent to Gertrude's parents, a canary, a puppy, a diamond ring. 
Gertrude conversed intelligently on political topics and her father 
gave up his position as he was about to accept a five-thousand-dollar 
job in Washington. Then came the crash. Gertrude had never met 
the President nor his wife, but had made lavish presents and bought 
many articles which she had stored with a neighbor, and to her 

* See P. Felix-Thomas: Le Mensonge. Revue Pedagogique, 1907, vol. 50, 
pp. 509-519. Also Die pathologische Liige, by H. Piper. Zeits. f. Pad., Psy., 
Path., u. Hygiene, 1906, vol. 8, pp. 1-15. From the preceding article and also 
in the following many cases are cited in this text. Einige interessante Kinderliigen, 
von O. Lipmann, ibid., pp. 85-88. 

^ Ueber pathologische Traumerei und ihre Beziehungen zur Hysteric. Jahrb. 
f. Psychiatrie u. Neurologic, 1895-96, vol. 14, pp. 280-301. 



360 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

parents' especial horror had laid in a large stock of fairy tales and 
other fiction. This points a moral against the pedagogic theory that 
would starve the imagination.^ 

A bright girl of thirteen was brought to a Sunday-school class, at 
the close of which she declared she was unable to walk, and so a lady 
took her in her carriage to her house. That evening the clergyman 
heard a moan and found this girl on his piazza, tied hand and foot, 
with a rude splint made of shingles on her arm. She said she had 
been beaten and left on the street near by but managed to crawl to 
the piazza. He and his wife sat up all night with her fixing the 
splint and in the morning a lady neighbor took her to a house she 
falsely designated as her home, but as the lady rang the bell to have 
her carried in she slipped out of the opposite door of the carriage 
and ran. Her mother, who was afterwards found, declared that the 
girl loved such adventures. 

A Boston schoolgirl of thirteen, Mary G., fell sick of diphtheria 
but was well on the road toward convalescence when a girl classmate 
brought the news to the teacher in school one morning that she had 
suddenly died, telling of the death with great detail, and in due time 
reporting the funeral. Many wept and at the suggestion of the 
teacher a collection of a hundred and sixty-three pennies was made by 
the children for flowers. These the teacher sent to the mother with 
a note of condolence and went to express her grief. The mother 
was dismayed at the news and on telephoning to the hospital it was 
found that Mary was well enough to go home that day. 

A girl of eight came to school one morning in the fall with a full 
account of a summer's visit to Europe, during which she had ridden 
a horse, had a railroad accident, experienced a severe storm at sea, 
and had many other adventures, although in fact she had never left 
home. 

F. Guillermet ^ reports a very imaginative girl of twelve years of 
age. On being reprimanded for bad work in school she excused 
herself by saying that a little sister had just been born at home and 
that had put the house in confusion. This child was the subject of 
conversation between teacher and pupil for several months, and 
survived various infantile maladies. Finally it died and the pupil 
was excused to attend the funeral. Upon calling to express sympathy 
for the bereaved mother, what was the teacher's astonishment to 
learn that there had never been either infant, disease, or death. 
This child ^ eight years later became a remarkable spiritual medium. 

J. Demoor and Daniel ^ report another girl of twelve who reported 
her mother sick at home and gave many details. She grew steadily 

^ This story is told more in detail in the preface of C. A. Ragozin's Siegfried 
and Beowulf. Putnam's, N. Y., 1898, 332 p. 

^ Un cas de mensonge infantile. Archives de Psychologie, 1902-3, vol. 2, p. 377. 

^ Les Enfants anormaux a Bruxelles. Annee Psychologique, 1900, vol. 7, pp. 
296-313- 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^1 

worse and died. After a few days the child returned to school weep- 
ing and clad in black. Some months later the father married again 
and the child repeated the details of the wedding as she had done of 
the funeral of her mother. Sometime afterwards it was learned that 
the mother of this child was living with her father and had never 
been ill. 

T. Jonckheere ^ quotes a case of a backward girl, also twelve, who 
was thought to have some symptoms of rickets and was examined in 
the presence of an instructor. To this end she only had to unbutton 
her dress a little behind that the spinal column might be felt. On 
returning to the class she stated that the doctor had entirely un- 
dressed her. This gave rise to public accusation and calumny for the 
physician. Children's lies have often, thus, a legal significance, and 
this is a question that should bear upon the age and circumstances 
under which their testimony should be admitted in court. The very 
sensations of backward children are often defective; still more so 
their attention, associations, and judgments. 

The literature of imaginary companions is now represented by 
quite a list of reports. Chairs are often set for these creations of 
fancy at the table. They have many adventures. There are many 
epidemics of hair-clipping, and the existence of sexual perverts who 
have this mania is undoubted; nevertheless many of these cases are 
entirely fictitious, one estimate being that about three out of ten are 
true. In other cases girls have cut off their own hair to make the 
sensation and to be the centers of interest, and in other cases have 
honestly thought their hair longer or more abundant than it was 
and so have imagined an adventure. 

There is a sense in which all virtue is truth and all error and sins 
are lies. Fidelity to human nature and its real needs is the highest 
truth. Of course teachers and parents can do very much to develop 
truthfulness, which at first is loyalty to persons. Without affecting 
a nimbus of infallibility they can at least rigorously keep their 
promises and execute their threats and avoid casuistry and over- 
subtlety, and taboo the current social lies of conventionality, fads 
and shams, and set examples of real and constant love of truth. It 
must, however, be reluctantly admitted that the sciences of nature 
are a little hard on the imagination of young children, who find in 
the humanities, literature, poetry, and romance, much more that is 
congenial to their own nature, which has thus more appetizing 
pabulum. 

I have culled these cases, which could be indefinitely multi- 
plied, because they are representative, and illustrate so many 
points vi^hich psychology should investigate on account of 

* Le Mensonge chez les Arrier^s. Archives de Psychologic, 1902-3, vol. 2, pp. 
263-66. 



362 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

their great scientific and practical importance. We know 
little of the female soul and are just beginning to realize our 
ignorance. These often thwarted and aborted lives show, I 
think, a propensity to attract attention and to be of importance, 
which is abnormal only in its degree and is morbidly and pre- 
cociously developed. Some of these cases represent the revolt 
of natures handicapped by heredity and cramped in a narrow 
sphere, repressed more even than has been the lot of the 
average woman during all the historic period. Modes of 
asserting themselves like the above are, of course, very 
pathetic. Psycho-analytic methods which consist of reactions 
to test words by naming others first suggested by them, show 
that where the response is truthful and immediate, the time 
required by the mind to pass from a suggested idea to the one 
nearest related to it is always less and often much less than 
where the nearest association is passed over and another one 
that arises later selected to avoid betrayal. Thus criminals 
and all those with painful experiences in their lives which 
they desire to conceal can, as is well known, often be detected 
by the long pause between the stimulus-word and the reaction 
to it. Lying involves hesitation, and this sheds light upon 
the very nature of consciousness as essentially remedial and 
therapeutic. Some of the above cases are intoxicated with 
the lust to broaden their experience, be and do things that they 
have heard others were or did, or to make possibilities actual. 
Moreover, there is a strange tingling inebriation with the 
sense of being alive, that flagrant falsehood better than any- 
thing else can excite in some natures. Precisely what they 
are not, they assume; what they cannot achieve, they do; 
wishes reel and riot toward realization. They become drunk 
and debauched with lies as many have recourse to strong- 
drink to escape the stress and strain of real life when it is 
hard, poor and mean, for this is the chief motive that drives 
many to drink. Without entering here upon this which is 
one of the most fascinating themes in contemporary psychol- 
ogy, it must suffice to say that it is this view point which re- 
veals the best of all cures and preventives of lying, viz., to 
enlarge and enrich actual life, to fill out experiences, so as to 
narrow the chasm between fact and fiction. The more 
physical development which tends to establish a close bond 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^3 

between knowing and doing, the more varied and interesting 
and absorbing the daily life, the more the best and the strong- 
est feelings are stirred and given vent; the more the youthful 
soul palpitates with the joy of existence and accomplishment, 
the more zestful is the knowledge acquired and the less is the 
temptation to every form of lying. Conversely, where life is 
made dull and straitened by the environment or tense by 
disease or defect, so that the soul is habitually hungry, there 
we have temptation to many ways of escape, from runaways 
to falsehood. As Jove was said to have recourse to his 
thunder only when he was wrong, so error is more prone to be 
•fanatical than is truth. Without knowing it these hysterical 
girls feel disinherited and robbed of their birthright. Their 
bourgeoning woman's instinct to be the center of interest and 
admiration bursts all bonds, and they speak and even act out 
what with others would be only secret reverie. Thus they can 
not only be appreciated but marveled at, can almost become 
priestesses, pythonesses, maenads, and set their mates, neigh- 
bors, or even great savants agog and agape while they have 
their fling at life, reckless of consequences. Thus they can 
be of consequence, respected, observed, envied, perhaps even 
studied. So they defy their fate and wreak their little souls 
upon expression with abandon and have their supreme satis- 
faction for a day, impelled to do so by blind instinct which 
their intellect is too undeveloped to restrain. And all this 
because their actual life is so dull and empty. 

Kemsies, Burden, and Perez conclude that all children lie oc- 
casionally and that many have periods of doing so. Jean Paul Rich- 
ter says that up to five few children can have any sense of truth or 
falsehood. Most pedagogues, doctors, and jurists who have lately 
written so much on the subject have a very poor opinion of chil- 
dren's truthfulness and reliability in matters of importance where 
they become centers of interest, and hold that their testimony in 
court should always be accepted with caution, although, let us hope, 
that most try to be trustworthy. Imaginative children easily deceive 
themselves. When they feign pain they often really feel it, illusory 
though it is. One very early symptom of hysteria in girls is the dis- 
position to fabricate. There is sometimes a strange exhilaration and 
even intoxication for the most violent ruptures with objective truth 
and a passion both to simulate and to dissimulate. 

Demoor strongly advocates the exclusion of constitutional liars 
from school as dangerous sources of infection, but we should not 



364 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

forget that it is the voracious appetite for knowledge that often makes 
children credulous. If the curriculum is formal, contentless, and un- 
interesting, this tendency to break out and escape if they cannot find 
objects of interest is strong. The mental constitution of children 
is full of slumbering latent tendencies to most of the experiences of 
the race that have been so rich and manifold, and its push-up toward 
an out-crop in the fecund fancy of youth is strong. Some so-called 
lies are doubtless projections of ancestral experience into the child's 
consciousness. Children love and doubtless prefer truth but they 
want it in great abundance and it must palpitate with reality and 
emotion; and if their life is poor and their environment unfurnished, 
they supply themselves with an objective world that meets the crav- 
ings of their soul even if they have to improvise it. Thus the crav- 
ing for excitement is something that needs to be met in the interests 
of truth. 

Very different and far more common are errors char- 
acteristic of childhood which very often shade over by im- 
perceptible gradations into fabrications. The human organ- 
ism is so made that man is prone to deception. The senses 
are fruitful of illusions and delusions, which one of the 
most interesting chapters in psychology explains. Straight 
lines seemed curved, and vice versa. The color sense and that 
of motion are easily deceived. Conjurors have stated that 
they can almost make any man believe he perceives anything.^ 
Of 165 children 78 described a ball going upward and dis- 
appearing in the air when it was not thrown at all. Of 381 
children 76 saw a toy camel move when a crank which they 
thought drew it was turned, although in fact it was motion- 
less. Distilled water seems perfumed by suggestion. The 
prestidigitator's patter, which is often his real art, consists in 
misdirecting attention, while the essential thing is done in its 
indirect field. The art consists in guiding perception to what 
is not done. In fraudulent spirit manifestations, dozens of 
people recognize the same mask in a dim light as the face of 
their dead relatives. Mediums are seen to rise in the air, 
things vanish in the fourth dimension of space. Error, like 
truth, flourishes in crowds by contagion. Hence tricks are 
easy before large audiences. As the strength of a chain is its 

' See N. Triplett: The Psychology of Conjuring Deceptions. Amer. Jour, of 
Psy., July, 1900, vol. ii, pp. 439-510. Also Joseph Jastrow: Fact and Fable in 
Psychology. Houghton, Mifflin, Bost. and N. Y., 1900, p. 106 et seq. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^5 

weakest link, so the critical power of a crowd is its weakest 
individual. The story of psychic delusions, epidemics, and 
fads seems to show that victims love to believe and hate to be 
undeceived by coming to the truth. 

An unique series of studies on children's capacity to observe and 
report truthfully has lately been made which is of interest and im- 
portance to jurists and to psychologists. Most of these have been 
published in the German serial entitled " Beitrage zur Psychologic der 
Aussage." One of the first of these, however, was by M. Buisson ^ 
who collected reports on data from no schoolboys and 40 girls, and 
classifies their returns as follows. First, he found half a dozen strictly 
pathological cases. In a second group fell another half dozen cases 
due to overstrict teachers and brutal parents, where lies were the 
product of fear. In a third group of some 25, lying was a product of 
a vicious environment, chiefly at home. In some cases children were 
taught to lie and steal, or perhaps given too much liberty and too great 
responsibility. The fourth group comprises lies of interest, beginning 
with exculpation. To have once escaped merited punishment by a lie 
often marks a sad epoch for a child. Under lies of interest, which be- 
long here, fall perhaps especially those which are inseparable from 
theft. The fifth group of lies are motivated by imagination, vanity, 
desire of display. At first, the child may a quarter believe his own 
fable. Soon he cannot distinguish between what is real and what is 
fancied. It is an aesthetic necessity to recount what is beautiful and 
to embellish facts. One constructive liar almost reedited the stories 
of the Odyssey. 

In the above groups there seem two larger classes : first, lies that 
begin in an hallucination and develop automatically as the imagina- 
tion warms, perhaps to improvisation or to consummate cleverness, 
or courage that becomes foolhardy. In the other class fall lies of 
conceit, affected superiority, and here is the chief danger of moral 
perversion. The above classes do not include lies without motive 
or those due to pure malevolence. 

M. Lobsien ^ tested 469 boys and girls from nine to fourteen as fol- 
lows : a. A chart containing twelve clearly but simply drawn familiar 
objects was shown for five seconds, when the children must immedi- 
ately write down how many things they saw and also what. h. Water 
was shown and the experimenter pretended to put in a drop of a 
named, and in another experiment an unnamed, substance that ap- 
pealed to taste. Each child tasted, with hygienic precautions, and 
in the first case was asked to state whether the substance was de- 

^ Rapport oral sur les mensonges d'enfants. Bull, de la Soc. Libre pour I'Etude 
Psy. de I'Enfant, 1902, pp. 130-137. 

^Aussage und Wirklichkeit bei Schulkindern. Beitrage zur Psy. der Aussage, 
1903, vol. I, Heft 2, pp. 26-89. 



366 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tected, and in the second what it was. This was repeated also in two- 
fold form for smell, c. Four groups of ten words each, designed to 
test the type of memory, were read, to be immediately written after- 
wards, d. A colored picture was shown for two minutes, and twelve 
questions asked about it. e. A theatrical representation of simplified 
plays was seen, to be described. In comparing the children's state- 
ments with the facts, the age of twelve was found best for test a. 
Nearly half stated that they had seen more than the twelve things 
shown. To this error girls and younger boys were most prone. From 
two thirds to three fourths of the objects seen were named, and when 
the experiment was repeated twenty-four and then again forty-eight 
hours afterwards, more objects were named, but the order was greatly 
changed. In h all the children at the age of eleven and twelve, mostly 
boys, tasted and smelled a purely imaginary substance, but at the age 
of fifteen or sixteen only a Httle over one third did so. When the 
substance was not named the imagination in the false cases took 
a very wide range. In c many things not in the picture were imag- 
ined. The boys' description of the boy who lay fishing on a bank 
in the picture was of a hale, rough, stalky fellow, but the girls called 
him pretty, with a pleasant face, fine, with white shoes and satin 
jacket, light-blue eyes, and in general made him too delicate and 
refined. Boys excel girls throughout, even in color. Girls were more 
prone to underestimate numbers and distance in perspective, and 
boys to overestimate them. No fish were in sight, but in answer to 
the vexier question, how many fish he had caught, the boys in all 
say 142, and the girls 73, both often naming a number. Throughout 
the striking result is the number of omissions and falsifications. By 
analysis it appeared that the acoustic-optic and the type combining 
these with the motor are more common than the pure types or than 
any other combination, and that these types give truest and fullest 
returns. The worst optical testimony was by those essentially ear- 
minded and vice versa. The highest intelligence goes with the motor 
type, and the worst pupils are in the acoustic group. One surprising 
result is that when the questions were repeated twenty-four and 
forty-eight hours afterwards without showing the pictui^ again, 
better results appeared, more things were named, and the descriptions 
were better than when the record was made immediately after seeing, 
so that freshness of impression and truth were in a sense opposed. 
In a sitbsequent study ^ Lobsien showed that for some if not most, of 
these tests, the number of reproductions increased for successive 
days, at least seven. This result surprised him and he repeated ex- 
periments, all of which confirmed it. He ascribes the improvement 
of statement to will, wish, or to suggestion, etc. He concludes that 
the optical type does not make the best witness even to what is seen. 
The theatrical experiments gave few new results. 

* Ueber das Gedachtnis fiir bildlich dargestellte Dinge in seiner Abhangigkeit 
von der Zwischenzeit. Beitrage z. Psy. d. Aussage, 1904, vol. 2, Heft 2, pp. 17-30. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^7 

William Stern ^ showed a highly colored picture of a peasant fam- 
ily at dinner to school children of from seven to eighteen years indi- 
vidually for one minute, telling them to observe carefully every detail. 
This was done in a room apart from the school and each child was 
asked to tell all it could recall. This was stenographically noted. 
When all that could be spontaneously reproduced in this way had been 
stated, a second stage of the experiment consisted in asking ques- 
tions, exhorting each to answer carefully and with fidelity. The 
pupil was then dismissed, but charged not to speak of the experiment 
to his mates, and some days later was asked to repeat his narrative, 
and questions were also asked again, although the picture was not 
shown. The result showed that about one fourth of all the declara- 
tions were false. Boys excelled girls in the number of right items 
about ten per cent. At the age of seven, one in three, and at fourteen, 
one in five, statements were false. In the number of items boys im- 
prove fastest from seven to ten, while girls make little advance, but 
improve very rapidly from ten to fourteen, and at the latter age slightly 
excel boys. In fidelity of reproduction boys are best till twelve, when 
they are surpassed by girls. In the spontaneous statements there were 
but six per cent of errors. The number of correct spontaneous items 
was at thirteen double that at seven, and trebled it at eighteen, but the 
degree of correctness changed little with age. Answers to questions 
were nearly one third false. In 131 instances out of 2,764 questions to 
forty-six pupils, objects were put into the picture that were not there. 
The constrained depositions were in general five and a half times as 
erroneous as when the statements were free. The false answers were 
due to erroneous association suggested by the question, which prompts 
to fill a gap, and the answer is often a product not of conviction but 
of anxiety. Alternative questions with " either or " prompt random 
replies. The falsifications are sometimes gross. In spontaneity value, 
persons lead and things follow. Optical space is more reliable than 
color and the registration of objectivity is in general not pure, but a 
product of selection by attention and interest; still, the latter best 
secures correctness. In nearly all respects boys excel girls, and the 
improvement due to age is in just those matters where boys excel, 
so that the result is as if girls were younger. In the spontaneous 
utterances the per cent of error remained pretty constant, whatever 
the number of items. For a few years before puberty improvement 
was very slight, but when it dawned became rapid for several years. 
Taking all the tests together the average improvement from seven to 
eighteen is only some fifty per cent, showing that this function is not 
basal as an index of mental development. Spontaneity versus recep- 
tivity shows a greater increment and is a better index, for with it goes 
a stronger resistance to false suggestion. Substance, action, quality- 
relation are three stadia of development which are also probably seen 

^ Die Aussage als geistige Leistung und als Verhorsprodukt. Beitrage z. Psy. 
der Aussage, 1904, vol. i, Heft 3, p. 147. 



368 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

in speech. Practical anthropocentric interests lead. Girls are even 
more inferior in spontaneity than in receptivity and every difficulty 
increases their inferiority, boys at fourteen, just entering puberty, 
about equaling girls of the same age, who are in the height of this fer- 
ment. Girls emphasize personal and boys the material interests, their 
reliability even in color being somewhat markedly behind that of boys.^ 

Stern in his " Erinnerung, Aussage und Liige in der ersten 
Kindheit," I and II, gives a number of interesting illustrations and 
distinctions between real and apparent lies, with a final chapter on 
cure and prevention, laying chief stress on prophylaxis. Preventive 
measures can be overdone. Severe discipline is one of the chief pro- 
vocatives of lying, so that self-control and harmonious relations with 
its environment must be considered one of the chief preventives. 

A. Moll 2 passes judgment upon the experiments of the Aussage 
psychology that deal with errors in memory and perception, etc. 
Stern and Lipmann admit the need of control to be sure that the 
attention is called to the object and errors if improvement is sought. 
Moll thinks, however, the results of this kind of work are very slight, 
that the suspicion, too, as cast upon children's reliability in court is 
excessive. Opposite results as to the liability of the two sexes are 
obtained by different investigators. The controlled conditions of the 
experiment have not rendered all that is expected of them. The 
value of experiment for legal practice must not be overestimated or 
their real value will be neglected. Judges should know experimental 
psychology, but practical is better. 

R. Oppenheim,^ following Stern and Wreschner, showed thirty 
girls from ten to twelve, three well-known Walther colored pictures 
and then after one minute had them describe them spontaneously, and 
then afterwards look at them as long as they wished to see where they 
had made mistakes. When they had finished they were asked 50 ques- 
tions on each picture. Forty-nine out of the 90 tests were correct, 
but the questions brought a far larger proportion of error. Many 
of the latter were suggestive and usually yielded only 75 per cent true 
answers. To test whether this process was educable it was repeated 
with due separations after an interval. Each repetition showed 
marked improvement, from which the author infers that memory needs 
training and can be improved. Some of the questions required 
estimates of time and the result showed that small intervals were 
very greatly magnified. The estimates of space based upon a ques- 
tion as to the size of the picture also were very far from the truth. 
In these tests children of the higher schools showed themselves dis- 

' See abstract of Stern's work in lectures at Clark University. Amer. Jour, 
of Psy., April, 1910, vol. 21, pp. 270-282. 

* Bedeutung d. mod. Forschungen iiber d. Aussagepsychologie. Zeits. f. pad. 
Psy., Path. u. Hygiene, vol. 9, pp. 417-444. 

^ Ueber die Erziehbarkeit der Aussage bei Schulkindern. Beitrage z. Psy. d. 
Aussage, 1905, vol. 2, Heft 3, pp. 52-98. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^9 

tinctly superior to those of the folk-school both in spontaneity and 
truthfulness, but the pupils of the latter showed better results from 
training. The more gifted pupils did best. 

A. Bernstein and T. Bogdanoff ^ tested 286 children from seven to 
fifteen years of age. Nine arbitrary, very distinct, but simple figures 
w^ere shown, and after thirty seconds they were asked to identify these 
nine in a larger group of twenty-five also arranged in the form of a 
square, children of each age being tested separately. It was found 
that from eight to fifteen, correct identification increased with great 
steadiness from six to eight and one third of the nine, and the errors 
decreased, though slightly. Thus the accuracy of reperception or 
memory improved during this period. This was also true for the 
passive tests. 

O. Lipmann and E. Wendriner ^ asked children of six three sets of 
questions concerning one and the same object. The first question was 
without any suggestiveness ; the second was expectative (Latin 
Nonne or Num) ; and the third was a question with a definite pre- 
supposition in it. The result showed that knowledge was reduced six- 
teen per cent and faithfulness of reproduction nineteen per cent by 
the suggestive questions, the boys doing better than the girls. 

O. Kosog ^ tested forty children of an average age of eight and 
one half years as follows : on a white card a small dot of ink was made 
and the pupil must retreat until it could no longer be seen. After this 
had been done three times, unknown to the pupil a paper with no ink 
spot was substituted. Hearing was tested by a tuning fork which 
could be heard when its handle was placed squarely upon a resonator. 
This was done at first, but later, unknown to the pupil, omitted. 
Smell was tested by pouring from a small bottle, which really con- 
tained water, into a glass of water and the pupils were asked what 
they smelled. Taste was tested in a similar way, and touch was tested 
with a feather, the pupils being requested to tell when they felt its 
touch. Out of 440 experiments suggestion succeeded in sixty-five 
per cent of the cases. Deception due to suggestion occurred for 
touch least often; then followed sight, hearing, taste, and smell, the 
last showing about twice the suggestibility of the first. Good pupils 
seemed more suggestible than poor ones, perhaps because they were 
more ambitious to show their power. There was little difference of 
sex and little effect of fatigue. 

Scripture describes the first lie as the beginning of man's fall 
from paradise. Since then, says F. Kemsies,^ the lie has become 

^ Experimente iiber das Verhalten der Merkfahigkeit bei Schulkindern. Bei- 
trage z. Psy. d. Aussage, 1905, vol. 2, Heft 3, pp. 115-131. 

^ Aussage-Experimente im Kindergarten, ihid., pp. 132-137. 

^ Suggestion einfacher Sinneswahrnehmungen bei Schulkindern. Beitrage z. 
Psy. d. Aussage, 1905, vol. 2, Heft 3, pp. 99-114. 

* Zur Einteilung der Liigen und Aussagen. Zeits. f. pad. Psy., Path. u. Hygiene, 
1905, vol. 7, Heft 3, pp. 183-192, 
25 



370 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

universal for all races and ages despite the fact that it is every- 
where condemned. Perhaps nothing is a better measure of the moral 
level of an individual or a race than the proportion of falsehood 
and truth in their lives. Many seem to be perjurers by nature, and 
any outrage upon truth is justified if it attains the end. The study 
of children's falsehoods has been in recent years undertaken in a 
comprehensive v^^ay, and now psychologists, teachers, jurists, and 
doctors combined are shedding much new light upon the subject, 
and many experiments and pseudo-metric methods are in use. The 
test of truth is in the degree of agreement between the objective thing 
or act and the subjective conviction. Kemsies devises an intricate 
diagrammatic method of indexes of truth and falsehood, twenty-seven 
in number, showing all the combinations between objective reality 
and conviction in order to determine which are really punishable 
and which are due to imperfect knowledge, inadequate or partial 
forms of expression, perception, errors, etc. He divides lies into 
the following ten groups: (i) Spurious lies in play, tricks, etc.; 
(2) errors in the form of statement; (3) errors of fact, including 
illusions of memory, judgment, perception ; (4) excusive lies from 
anxiety, embarrassment, flattery, and idle boasting; (5) lies with base 
motives, selfishness, defiance, envy, revenge; (6) those with noble 
motives, such as humility, self-sacrifice for others, or by command; 
(7) pure lie as a character fault; (8) the pathological lies of hys- 
teria, moral insanity, epilepsy, and paralysis; (9) criminal lies, such 
as theft, counterfeiting, treachery, etc.; (10) lies of subnormal in- 
dividuals. The powers of expression or statement can be systematic- 
ally improved by practice and instruction. German writers have 
discussed at considerable length the question whether children can 
tell real lies before the age of four.^ From this study it appears that 
children who simulate pain, to escape from something they desire to 
avoid, often really feel the pain in some degree, and that their souls 
are fields of both positive and negative illusions of memory. 

G. L. Duprat ^ warns us against relying too implicitly upon statis- 
tics to determine the relative force of children's motives for lying. 
This author attempts the most elaborate classification yet made ; first, 
of lies themselves into (a) affirmative, due to exaggeration, fiction, 
play, calumnies, and simulation, and (b) negative, such as saying " no," 
elaborate denials and dissimulation. He also recognizes attenuations 
of the truth, sophistical lies, and those by individuals and groups. 
He then classifies the liars themselves. The affirmative class are 
imaginative and their lies may be marked by great inventiveness, by 
fraud, falsification; while the deniers are divided into those by habit 

' Karl L. Schaefer: Kommen Liigen bei Kindern vor dem vierten Jahre vor? 
Zeits. f. pad. Psy., Path. u. Hygiene, 1905, vol. 7, pp. 195-201. See also Marci- 
nowski: Zur Frage der "Liige bei Kindern unter vier Jahren," ibid., pp. 201-205. 

^ Une enquete psychologique sur le mensonge Bull, de la Soc. Libre pour 
I'Etude Psy. de I'Enfant, 1902, pp. 220-229. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 371 

and by accident. Yet more complex is his classification of the psy- 
chological causes and the principles of association which are involved. 
(0) Under the principle of invention he classifies lies of pride, boast- 
ing, cupidity, social and antisocial tendencies, enthusiasm, logism or 
illogism. (b) The negative causes are attenuation, fear, shame, and 
modesty, repulsion, antisocial tendencies, or depression and lack of 
generosity. Under pathological causes may be general, such as 
heredity, prejudice, custom, politeness, and fraud, or local, due to 
religious or political institutions, servilism, etc. 

The following study was made under my direction in 
Boston in 1888. 

For some years four accomplished and tactful lady teach- 
ers, finding in even the best ethical literature little help in 
understanding and in dealing with certain current and more 
or less licensed forms of juvenile dishonesty connected with 
modern school life, undertook, as a first step toward getting 
a fresh and independent view of the facts of the situation, to 
question and observe individual children, by a predetermined 
system, as to their ideals and practices, and those of their 
mates in this regard. These returns now represent nearly 
three hundred city children of both sexes, mostly from twelve 
to fourteen years of age, selected, generally, by the teachers as 
average or representative children in this respect, and inter- 
viewed privately and in an indirect way, most carefully de- 
signed to avoid all indelicacy to the childish conscience. 
From the nature of the subject, and from the diverse degrees, 
not only of interest, but even of trustworthiness of the in- 
dividual returns, as well as from the fact that the experience 
and opinion of many teachers were also gathered, the results 
hardly admit tabular statistical presentation. A general state- 
ment of them, according to the groups into which they nat- 
urally fall, will be serviceable, it is hoped, to thoughtful 
parents and teachers as well as to psychologists.^ 

I. No children were found destitute of high ideals of 
truthfulness. Perhaps the lowest moral development is repre- 
sented by about a dozen children who regarded every deviation 
from the most painfully literal truth as alike heinous, with no 
perspective or degrees of difference between white and black 

* I am indebted to Mrs. Pauline A. Shaw for the means to carry out this study 
and to Miss Sara E. Wiltse and her teachers for collecting data. 



372 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

fibbing and the most barefaced, intended, or unintended lies. 
This mental state, though in a few cases probably priggish 
and affected, became in others so neurotic that to every state- 
ment, even to yes and no, " I think " or " perhaps " was added 
mentally, whispered, or in two cases aloud, and nothing could 
prompt a positive, unqualified assertion. This condition, not 
unknown among adults in certain morbid states of conscience, 
we will designate as pseudophohia, and place it among the 
many other morbid fears that prey upon unformed or unpoised 
minds. One boy told of " spells " of saying over hundreds 
of times when alone the word " not," in the vague hope it 
might somehow be interpolated into the divine record of his 
many wrong stories, past and future, to disinfect them and 
neutralize his guilt. Another had a long period of fear that 
like Ananias and Sapphira he might some moment drop down 
dead for a chance, and perhaps unconscious, lie. As in bar- 
baric lands a score of crimes, though perhaps recognized as of 
different degrees of depravity, are worthy the maximal penalty 
of death, so inaccuracies of statement, though distinguished 
from blacker falsehoods, are still lies, though unintended. 
This moral superstition, which seemed mostly due to mixing 
ethical and religious teaching in unpedagogic ways or propor- 
tions in home or Sunday-school, is happily rare, generally 
fugitive, is not germane to the nature of childhood, and is 
likely to rectify itself. Where it persists it begets a quibbling, 
word-splitting tendency, a logolatry, or a casuistic habit result- 
ing sometimes in very systematized palliatives, tricks, and 
evasions, which may become distinctly morbid. There are 
few children even at the beginning of public-school life who 
need much help in distinguishing between unintentional and 
premeditated wrong statements, and yet a little aid in so 
doing, if given with proper illustrations and tact, is almost 
sure to be serviceable in developing a healthful moral con- 
sciousness. Of this state we desire more records of cases with 
details illustrative of cause and cure, etc. 

II. Strongly contrasted with this state, and far more 
common, is that in which lies are justified as means to noble 
ends. Children all admire burly boys who by false confes- 
sions take upon themselves the penalties for the sins of weaker 
playmates, or even girls who are conscious of being favorites 



CHILDREN'S LIES 373 

with teacher or parent, or of superior powers of blandishment, 
and who claim to be the authors of the misdeeds of their more 
disfavored mates. The situations, especially the latter, were 
met with many times, and the act was always approved though 
often with some rather formal qualifications. One case, 
which bore traces of idealization, was described in which the 
quality of the heroism was of almost epic magnificence, and 
the sin-bearer's gracious lie seemed to have quite passed out 
of sight. A teacher who told her class of thirteen-year-old 
children the tale of the French girl in the days of the Com- 
mune, who, when on her way to execution on a petty charge, 
met her betrothed and responded to his agonized appeals, 
" Sir, I do not know you," and passed on to death alone be- 
cause she feared recognition might involve him in her doom, 
was saddened because she found it so hard to make her pupils 
name as a lie what was so eclipsed by heroism and love. 
Children have a wholesome instinct for viewing moral situa- 
tions as wholes, but yet are not insensitive to that eager and 
sometimes tragic interest which has always for all men in- 
vested those situations in both life and in literature where 
duties seem to conflict. The normal child feels the heroism 
of the unaccountable instinct of self-sacrifice far earlier and 
more keenly than it can appreciate the sublimity of truth. 
Theoretic or imagined cases of this kind were often volun- 
teered by the children with many variations. They declare, 
e. g., that they would say that their mother was out when she 
was in, if it would save her life, giving quite a scenic setting 
to such a possible occurrence, adding infrequently that this 
would not make it exactly right, though it would be their duty 
to do it, or that they would not tell a like lie to save their own 
lives. A doctor, too, many suggested, might tell an over- 
anxious patient or dearest friend that there was hope, easing 
his conscience, perhaps, by reflecting that they had some 
though he had none. In confronting such cases, it is the 
conscientious parent or teacher who is most liable to get 
nervous and err. It is feared, that although the end is very 
noble and the fib or quibble very petty at first, worse lies for 
meaner objects may follow. The fondness and even sense of 
exhilaration, with which children often describe such situa- 
tions, is often due to a feeling of easement from a rather 



374 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tedious sense of the oblig-ation of undiscrimlnating-, universal 
and rigorously literal veracity, under which also very often 
lurks an effort to find the flavor of exculpation for more inex- 
cusable lies. The teacher may by multiplying, analyzing, or 
even by too much attention to such cases develop a kind of 
morbid ethical self-consciousness and precocity. He may, as 
the history of education shows, make even children into 
casuists gravely disputing about the grand moral forces that 
beneath all others make the world of man their revelation or 
their sport. No two children and no two moral situations are 
alike. Here human science faces problems still too complex 
for formulation, where the adult has really very little to teach 
the child, and where conference and suggestion, and even 
instruction, should be restricted to specific and individual cases 
and not lapse into generalization. The special pedagogic 
utilization of these cases should generally, we believe, be the 
following. The child who gets really interested in what it 
deems the conflict of veracity with other duties, may be 
reverently referred to the inner light of its own conscience. 
This seems to be a special opportunity of Nature for teaching 
the need of keeping a private protestant tribunal where per- 
sonal moral convictions preside, and which alone enables men 
to adapt themselves to new ethical situations or environments. 
III. With most children, as with savages, truthfulness is 
greatly affected by personal likes and dislikes. In many cases 
they could hardly be brought to see wrong in lies a parent 
or some kind friend had wished them to tell. Often suspected 
lies were long persisted in till they were asked if they would 
have said that to their mothers, when they at once weakened. 
No cases were more frequent than where, in answer to a 
friend's question, if some thing or act they did not particularly 
admire, was not very nice or pretty, they found it hard to 
say " no," and compromised on " kind of nice," or " pretty 
enough," when if a strange pupil had asked they would have 
had no trouble with their consciences. The girls in our returns 
were more addicted to this class of lies than boys. Boys keep 
up joint or complotted lies which girls rarely do, who " tell 
on" others because they are "sure to be found out," or " some 
one else will tell," while boys can be more readily brought to 
confess small thefts, and are surer to own up if caught, than 



CHILDREN'S LIES 375 

girls. A question of personal interest with girls is how far eti- 
quette may stretch truth to avoid rudeness or hurting others' 
feelings. All children find it harder to cheat in their lessons 
with a teacher they like. Friendships are cemented by frank 
confidences and secrets and promises not to tell, as adults with 
real attachments desire to know and be known without reserva- 
tion, without overpraise or flattery, and to rely on and per- 
form pledges. To simulate or dissimulate to the priest, or 
above all, to God, was repeatedly referred to as worst of all. 
On the other hand, with waning attachment, promises not to 
tell weaken in their validity. Strange children, and espe- 
cially impertinent meddlers, may be told " I do not know " 
when one means " none of your business " as a mental reserva- 
tion. Children say they are not going to a place they intend 
to visit to avoid unwelcome company, and victimize an enemy 
by any lie or strategy they can invent. Truth for our friends 
and lies for our enemies is a practical, though not distinctly 
conscious rule widely current with children, as with uncivilized 
and, indeed, even with civilized races. Rural children are 
more liable to long and close intimacies, and are more shy and 
suspicious of all strangers. The sense of personal loyalty to 
those who are admired is so strong that it has produced, not 
only many kinds and systems of fagging, but inclines children 
to mistake what pleases their idol as good and true. If their 
favorites desire or even permit them to lie or cheat for their 
benefit, as false codes sometimes require, if extravagant vows 
or protestations are made that cannot be kept, or that must be 
kept at great moral cost, or if too many secrets are shared that 
need often to be guarded by prevarications, then children are 
being trained for corrupt combinations of any sort in adult 
life. On the other hand, it is through the instinct of personal 
fealty, so strong in children that most men have grown up to 
a sense of fidelity to God and even of the obligation of 
scientific truthfulness. It has taken mankind long enough 
to learn the sublimity of a kind of truthfulness which is no 
respecter of persons. The best correction of this general 
tendency of children, we believe to be instruction in science, 
the moral needs and uses of which alone call loudly for more 
of it and better. But the teachers of younger children should 
look well to their friendships, and study, especially, the char- 



376 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

acter of leaders and favorites and try to mold it as well as 
strive to be loved by all, not forgetting that only children v^ith 
bad friends are worse off than those with none, and that they 
will be more faithful to great causes for having been faithful 
to dear and good friends. 

IV. The greatest number of lies in our collections are 
prompted by some of the more familiar manifestations of 
selfishness. Every game, especially, every exciting one, has 
its own temptation to cheat; and long records of miscounts in 
tallies, moving balls in croquet, crying out " no play " or " no 
fair " at critical moments to divert impending defeat, false 
claims made to umpires, and scores of others show how un- 
scrupulous the all-constraining passion to excel often renders 
even young children. In those games which attract wider 
attention, where sets of picked players are pitted against one 
another, and the prizes in local fame are great and immediate, 
dexterity in cheating is sometimes regarded as a legitimate 
qualification along with others, the only discredit being, as in 
the lies Spartan children were encouraged to tell, in getting 
found out. Lies of this kind, prompted by excitement, are 
so easily forgotten when the excitement is over that they 
rarely rankle, and are hard to get at, but they make boys 
unscrupulous and grasping. School life is responsible for 
very many, if not most of the deliberate lies of this class. 
Where the vicious system of self-reporting for petty offenses, 
like whispering, exists, children confess not showing their 
hands when they are guilty. If pressed to tell if they saw or 
did a wrong they lie, and add, perhaps, that it is very easy to 
lie to get out of school scrapes. Few will not give, and not 
many will not take prompts or peep in their books, especially 
if in danger of being dropped or failing of promotion. Chil- 
dren copy school work and monitors get others to do theirs as 
pay for not reporting them, while if a boy is reported he tells 
of as much disorder as possible on the part of others, to show 
that the monitor did not do his duty. As school work is now 
done, much of it is of a kind that can be bought and sold. 
One teacher in a large city stated that so much more than they 
could really do was required of her pupils that she and her 
teacher friends were now obliged, in order that their rooms 
should not be unfavorably reported, to rewrite the English 



CHILDREN'S LIES 377 

exercises of many of their pupils, to be copied again by them 
before being seen by the examiners who had no time to see 
the work in process of doing. This could hardly have been a 
lesson in honesty to the pupils. The long list of headaches, 
nosebleeds, stomach aches, etc., feigned, to get out of or avoid 
going to school, of false excuses for absence and tardiness, 
the teacher, especially if disliked, being so often exceptionally 
fair game for all the arts of deception ; all this seems generally 
prevalent. This class of lies eases children over so many hard 
places in life and is a convenient cover for weakness and even 
vice. To lie easily and skillfully removes the restraint of the 
more or less artificial consequences attached by home and 
school to childish wrongdoing, and increased immunity always 
tempts to sin. The facility with which a whole street or school 
may be corrupted in this respect, often without suspicion on 
the part of adults, by a single bold, bad, but popular child, the 
immunity from detection which school offers so much more 
than home for even habitual lies of this class, as well as the 
degree of moral degradation to which they may lead, all point 
to selfish falsehoods — especially when their prevalence is taken 
into account — as on the whole the most dangerous, corrupting, 
and hard to correct of any of our species. Excessive emula- 
tions, penalties, opportunities, and temptations should of 
course be reduced, but it should be clearly seen that all these 
lies are at bottom, in a peculiar sense, forms of self-indulgence, 
and should, in the great majority of cases, be treated as such, 
rather than dealt with directly as lies. The bad habits they 
cover should be patiently sought out and corrected, for those 
who habitually do ill are sure to learn to lie to conceal it. 
The sense of meanness this slowly breeds must be met by 
appeals to honor, self-respect, self-control. Hard and even 
hated tasks, and rugged moral and mental regimen should 
supplement those modern methods which make education a 
sort of self-indulgence of natural interests. 

V. Much childish play owes its charm to partial self- 
deception. Children imagine or make believe they are ani- 
mals, making their noises and imitating their activities; that 
they are soldiers, and imagine panoramas of warlike events; 
that they are hunters in extreme peril from wild beasts; 
Indians, artisans, and tradesmen of many kinds; doctors. 



378 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

preachers, angels, ogres. They play school, court, meeting, 
congress. If hit with wooden daggers in the game of war 
they stand aside and play they are dead. If they step on a 
crack in walking the floor, curbing, sidewalk, etc., they say 
that they are poisoned. Protruding spots of earth or land in 
pools or ponds, or at half tide in the bay, suggest the geography 
of a continent, and in one case, for years, Boston, Providence, 
West Indies, Gibraltar, Brooklyn Bridge were thus designated 
by all the children of a large school in their plays. In another, 
a dozen hills and valleys, rills, near by were named from 
fancied resemblance to the familiar mountains, rivers, and 
valleys of the geography. The play house sometimes is so 
real as to have spools for barrels of flour, pounded rotten wood 
for sugar, pumpkin chairs, cucumber cows, moss carpets, sticks 
for doors which must be kept shut, sometimes cleaned, twig 
brooms, pet animals for stock with pastures and yards, all 
the domestic industries in pantomime, toadstools, lichens and 
puffballs for bric-a-brac, while some older boy and girl may 
play parents with secret pet names, and younger ones as chil- 
dren, often for a whole term and in rare instances for years; 
all of this, of course, being almost always in the country. 
They baptize cats, bury dolls, have puppet shows with so many 
pins admission, all with elaborate details. They dress up and 
mimic other often older people, ride on the horse cars and 
imagine them fine carriages, get up doll hospitals and play 
surgeon or Florence Nightingale. The more severe the dis- 
cipline of the play teacher and the more savage the play mother 
the better the fun. 

One phase of this is exquisitely illustrated in the life of 
Hartley Coleridge, by his brother. His many conceptions of 
his own ego — e. g., by the picture Hartley, shadow Hartley, 
echo Hartley, etc. ; his fancy that a cataract of what he named 
jug- force would burst out in a certain field, and flow between 
populous banks where an ideal government, long wars and 
even a reformed spelling illustrated in a journal devoted to 
the affairs of this realm, were all developed in his imagination 
where they existed with great reality for years; his stories to 
his mother continued for weeks; his reproduction of all he had 
seen in London, its theater, laboratory, and what he had read 
of wars, geographical divisions, in a large playground appro- 



CHILDREN'S LIES 379 

priated to his use — these all illustrate this normal tendency, 
but in a degree of intensity probably morbid, much resembling 
the pseudo-hallucinations of Kandinsky. Two sisters used to 
say, " Let us play we are sisters," thus making the relation 
more real. Cagliostro found adolescent boys particularly apt 
for his training to subserve the exhibition of the phrenologic- 
al impostures illustrating his thirty-five faculties. " He lied 
when he confessed he had lied," said a young Sancho Panza 
who had believed the wild tales of another boy who later con- 
fessed their falsity. Sir James Mackintosh in youth after 
reading Roman history used to fancy himself the emperor of 
Constantinople, and carry on the administration of the realm, 
hours at a time and often resumed for months. These fancies 
of his never amounted to conviction, but doubtless excited a 
faint expectation, which, had they been realized, would have 
lessened wonder. Charlotte Elizabeth lived largely in an 
imaginary realm for years in her youth. 

In some games like " crazy mother," younger children are 
commanded, or older ones stumped or dared, to do dangerous 
things, like walking a picket fence or a high roof, etc., in which 
the spirit of play overcomes great natural timidity; and by 
playing school with other mates, or perhaps parents, they are 
helped by the play instinct to do hard examples and other hated 
tasks they had scarcely accomplished in actual schools. The 
stimulus and charm of the imagination make them act a part 
different from their natural selves ; some games need darkness 
to help out the fancy. It seems almost the rule that imagina- 
tive children are more likely to be dull in school work, and that 
those who excel in it are more likely to have fewer or less vivid 
mental images of their own. Especially with girls, it is chiefly 
those under ten or twelve who play most actively in our school 
yards, but those of thirteen or fifteen, who, under the apathy 
that generally affects girls of that age, walk in pairs, or small 
groups up and down the yard and talk, are no less imaginative. 
One early manifestation of the shadowy falsity to fact of the 
idealizing temperament is often seen in children of three or 
four, who suddenly assert that they saw a pig with five ears, 
a dog as big as a horse, or, if older, apples on a cherry tree, 
and other Munchausen wonders, which really mean at first but 
little more than that they have that thought or have made that 



380 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

mental combination independently of experience. They come 
to love to tell semiplausible stories, and perhaps when the 
astonishment is over to confess. Or, again, all stories of men 
and things they hear are given a setting in the natural scenery, 
or far less often, in the houses they know best, and their friends 
are cast in the roles. The fancy of some children is almost 
visualization, and a few will tell at once, e. g., what was the 
color of Barbara Frietchie's dress, whether she wore glasses 
and a cap, just where in their father's sheep pasture the goblin 
in the " Arabian Nights " rose out of the bottle, if pictures of 
these objects have not obviated the normal action of this fac- 
ulty. Reverie which materializes all wishes, and the myth- 
opceic faculty which still occasionally creates a genuine myth 
among children, boys who amuse their mates with long and 
often clever yarns of their own invention, girls who make up 
ridiculous things about others — to all these the school has paid 
little attention, and Mr. Gradgrind would war upon them all 
as inimical to scientific veracity. We might almost say of chil- 
dren at least, somewhat as Froschammer argues of mental ac- 
tivity, and even of the universe itself, that all their life is im- 
agination. Such exercise of their faculties children must have 
even in the most platonic school republic. Its control and not 
its elimination is what is to be sought in the high interest of 
truthfulness. The progressive degeneration of the school 
reader, and the simultaneous development of flash literature for 
the young, has had much to do with the growth of evil tenden- 
cies in this field. To direct and utilize, so far as it needs it, 
this manifestation of the play instinct, which, though sporting 
with lies so gracious and innocent, may lead to so many kinds 
of divorce of thought from reality and to self-deception, the 
whole question of how best to introduce the young to the best 
literature of the world, each kind and grade in fit time and 
proportion, must, we believe, be pondered, and to this problem 
we shall turn elsewhere. How much of this can best be appre- 
ciated in children, and, if its peculiar quality of fancy is once 
lost, must remain caviare to it, only those know who have 
realized in their own experience and observation how youthful 
minds find and play about the chief beauties of ballads, of 
Homer properly told in English, and of the radical conceptions 
and great situations in the choicest English writers, if only put 



CHILDREN'S LIES 381 

in proper form. Psychologically, imaginative literature is a 
direct development from this variety of play, and into this its 
unfoldment is natural. 

VL A less common class of what we may call pathological 
lies was illustrated by about a score of cases in our returns. 
The love of showing off and seeming big, to attract attention 
or to win admiration, sometimes leads children, e. g., on going 
to a new town or school, to assume false characters, kept up 
with difficulty by many false pretenses awhile, but likely to 
become transparent and collapse, and to get the masker gen- 
erally disliked. A few children, especially girls, are honey- 
combed with morbid self-consciousness and affectation, and 
seem to have no natural character of their own, but to be 
always acting a part and attracting attention. Boys prefer 
fooling, and humbugging- by tricks or lies, sometimes of almost 
preternatural acuteness and cleverness. Several, e. g., com- 
bined to make what seemed a very complex instrument, with 
cords and pulleys and joints, called an " electrizer." Boys 
not in the secret were told to press smartly on the knob and 
they would feel a shock, when there was only a hidden pin. 
This is the normal diathesis which develops girls into hyster- 
ical invalids, deceiving sometimes themselves and sometimes 
their relatives, on whom faith curers work genuine miracles, 
and which makes boys into charlatans and impostors of many 
kinds. It is hard for many to believe that certain women who 
fulfill their social and domestic duties creditably can, with 
such placid naivete, relate long series of occurrences which 
they know to be utterly false, and that men they meet are 
indulging a life-long passion for deception, that they love the 
stimulus of violent ruptures with truth, or love lies for their 
own sake, as victims of other intoxicants love strong drink. 
The recent literature of both telepathy and hypnotism furnishes 
many striking examples of this type. Accessory motives, love 
of applause, money, etc., are at first involved, but later what 
we may designate as a veritable pseudomania supervenes where 
lies for others, and even self-deception is an appetite indulged 
directly against every motive of prudence and interest. As 
man cannot be false to others if true to self, so he cannot 
experience the dangerous exhilaration of deceiving others 
without being in a measure his own victim, left to believe his 



382 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

own lie. Those who have failed in many legitimate endeavors 
learn that they can make themselves of much account in the 
world by adroit lying. These cases demand the most prompt 
and drastic treatment. If the withdrawal of attention and 
sympathy, and belief in the earlier manifestations, and if in- 
struction and stern reprimand are not enough, there is still 
virtue in the rod, which should not be spared, and, if this fail, 
then the doctor should be called. 

VIL Finally, children have many palliatives for lies that 
wound the conscience. If one says " really " or " truly," 
especially if repeated, and most solemnly of all, " I wish to 
drop down dead this minute, if it is not so," the validity of any 
statement is greatly reduplicated. Only a child who is very 
hardened in falsehood, very fearful of consequences, or else 
truthful, will reiterate " it is so anyhow," even to tears in the 
face of evidence he cannot rebut, while others will confess or 
simulate a false confession as the easiest issue. Only young 
children who mistake for truth whatever pleases their elders, 
or, occasionally those too much commended for so doing, find 
pleasure in confessing what they never did. To say, Yes, and 
add in whisper, " in my mind," meant No, among the children 
of several schools at least in one large city. To put the left 
hand on the right shoulder also has power, many think, to 
reverse a lie, and even an oath may be neutralized or taken in 
an opposite sense by raising the left instead of the right hand. 
To think " I do not mean it," or to mean it in a different sense, 
sometimes excruciatingly different from what is currently 
understood was a form of mental reservation repeatedly found. 
If one tries not to hear when called, he may say he did not hear, 
with less guilt. An acted lie is far less frequently felt than a 
spoken one, so to nod is less sinful than to say Yes ; to point the 
wrong way when asked where some one is gone, is less guilty 
than to say wrongly. Pantomimed lies are, in short, for the 
most part, easily gotten away with. It is very common for 
children to deny in the strongest and most solemn way wrongs 
they are accused of, and when, at length, evidence is over- 
whelming, to explain or to think, " My hand, or foot did it, 
not I." This distinction is not unnatural in children whose 
teachers or parents so often snap or whip the particular mem- 
ber which has committed the offense. In short, hardly any of 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^3 

the sinuosities lately asserted, whether rightly or wrongly, of 
the earlier Jesuit confessionals, and all the elaborated phar- 
macopoeia of placebos they are said to have used to ease con- 
sciences outraged by falsehood, seem reproduced in the 
spontaneous endeavors of children to mitigate the poignancy 
of this sense of guilt. 

In fine, some forms of the habit of lying are so prevalent 
among young children that all illustrations of it, like the above, 
seem trite and commonplace. Thoroughgoing truthfulness 
comes hard and late, and school life is so full of temptation 
to falsehood that an honest child is its rarest, as well as its 
noblest, work. The chief practical point is for the teacher to 
distinguish the different forms of the disease and apply the 
remedies best for each. So far from being a simple perversity, 
it is so exceedingly complex, and born of such diverse and 
even opposite tendencies, that a course of treatment that would 
cure one form, would sometimes directly aggravate another. 
If we pass from the standpoint of Mrs. Opie to the deeper, but 
often misconceived one of Heinroth, and strive to realize the 
sense in which all sin and all disease are lies, because perver- 
sions of the intent of nature, we shall see how habitual false- 
hood may end, and in what, in a broad sense, it begins. A 
robust truth-speaking is the best pedagogic preparation for 
active life, which holds men up to the top of their moral con- 
dition above the false beliefs, false fears, and false shames, 
hopes, loves we are prone to. The effort to act a part or fill 
a place in life for which nature has not made us, whether it 
be school bred, or instinctively fascinating to intoxication as 
it is for feeble, characterless, psychophysic constitutions, is 
one of the chief sources of waste of moral energy in modern 
society; lies, acted, spoken, imagined, give that morbid self- 
consciousness so titillating to neurotic constitutions. The 
habitual gratification of all a child's wishes indirectly cultivates 
mendacity, for truth requires a robust and hardy self-sacrifice, 
which luxury makes impossible. Much society of strangers 
where " first impressions " are consciously made, favors it. 
Frequent change of environment, or of school or residence, 
favors it, for a feeling that " new leaves " can be easily turned 
arises. Frequent novelties, even of studies, probably cultivate 
one of its most incurable forms, viz., that state of nerves where 



384 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the first impression is strong and vivid and pleasurable, while 
repetitions are indifferent, if not soon positively painful; a 
condition which, but for multiplying the already large number 
of mild manias, might be called neonmnia. Children should 
be shielded from both the professional mendacity and the false 
exaggeration of the abnormal of the modern newspaper, and 
held to long and firm responsibility for their acts and words. 
When men or civilizations, yet capable of it, give up the lie 
and fall back to their best and truest selves, to be and to 
be accepted for what they really are by nature and hered- 
ity, one of the hig-hest and most intense of all pleasures is 
realized, which, though narrowed and conventionalized by 
many religious and dogmatic systems, is very manifold and 
may appear as general moral reformation, new intellectual in- 
sights, emotional easement and satisfaction, greater energy in 
action, and perhaps even greater physical betterment in cer- 
tain forms of disease in certain temperaments, and, in a word, 
is still from the standpoint of scientific psychology, not 
unworthy the grand old — but greatly abused term — Re- 
generation. 

Why do children lie ? asks N. Oppenheim ^ and he answers by say- 
ing that very many do it for no recognized reason, and it is generally 
thought to be an indication of spontaneous viciousness, but in most 
cases it is due to disorders of body or mind which interfere with the 
transmission of concepts or percepts from the internal to the external 
processes of expression so that they are unable to be more exact than 
they seem. Punishment confirms and aggravates these difficulties. 
Truth is not the only means of saving grace. The right physical 
and mental environment may cause a spontaneous reform in a liar. 
Any cause that makes for intellectual tenuity or a morbid nervous 
condition favors it. Teaching by rote, mechanical repetition and 
vicious stimuli that tend to a psychic poverty help it on. The right 
impression is side tracked and many people should no more be pun- 
ished for lying than for color blindness. A faulty disposition which 
irritates, repressing normal or exaggerated abnormal impressions, 
tends to break up concepts. Eye troubles, catarrhs, hysteria, loss of 
appetite and sleep tend in the same direction. 

Earl Barnes ^ says children lie because they cannot tell the truth, 
for truth involves knowledge. Their idea of truth is loyalty to per- 
sons. Egotism and contagion are sources of untruthfulness. In the 

* Why Children Lie, Pop. Sci. Mo., 1895, vol. 47, pp. 382-387. 

^ Why Children Lie, Current Literature, 1903, vol. 34, pp. 213-214, 



CHILDREN'S LIES 3^5 

sixteenth century one hundred thousand people were put to death for 
witchcraft. Many of them and most of the witnesses were children, 
usually girls from twelve to fourteen. The Children's Crusade illus- 
trated the same thing. If children misrepresent the truth it is 
a secondary symptom. They are timid, or want something. If 
you punish them you aggravate the difficulty. At three or four the 
child distinguishes well the lie from the truth. It can even play 
with fear and realizes what " for fun " means. Indeed, it would 
seem that by fourteen months this is well understood. Then it 
comes to distinguish with interest between what is truly real and 
what is not. 

J. Triiper ^ says the lie begins in error. The general view is that 
it is innate. This view was held not only by mediaeval theology, but 
by Roth in his ethics, and by Montaigne and Perez. It is described 
as a part of the selfishness of children. Every child, says Boudin, 
is a liar. Perez thinks the same, but ascribes it to the frequency 
with which children are allowed to see deception about them. The 
true view probably is that the newborn child has no moral quality, 
good or bad, and is therefore incapable of truth or untruth; is, in 
fact, not a moral being, but possessing only the possibility of becom- 
ing one. Fancy and egoism are the mainsprings of falsehood, and 
we may here observe Herbart's distinction between the faults the 
child makes and those it has. This makes truthfulness a matter of 
education. Jean Paul Richter says in the first five years children 
never speak truthor falsehood. They merely think aloud. Deception 
often begins with gestures and before speech is developed, although 
this opens to it a far larger field. Some children soon develop a great 
love of producing an effect, and if their imagination is brilliant, have 
thus an added temptation to lie, while cowardice, obstinacy, self- 
will and bad examples do their sad work. Sometimes with hereditary 
predispositions a lie is believed and may even become an hallucina- 
tion. In treatment special effort should be directed to produce sincere 
regret. 

J. G. Compayre ^ says children are not content with repeating what 
they have seen or heard, but they must invent or travesty. Perez ^ 
says that even in the cradle we sometimes see infants disposed to dis- 
simulation and ruse. Children have natural finesse and take to petty 
artifices because they are weak. Without being born so, they may 
become liars through the clumsiness of treatment by others. Their 
power of deception is sometimes incredible. Indeed, this is sometimes 
their only weapon in the struggle for existence. Their tenacity in 

* Luge. Rein's Encyklopadisches Handbuch d. Padagogik, 1897, vol. 4, pp. 
601-616. 

^ L'evolution intellectuelle et morale de I'enfant. Hachette, Paris, 1893, p. 
309 et seq. 

^ Bernard Perez, L' education morale des le berceau, 2d ed. Bailliere, Paris, 
1888, 320 p. 
26 



386 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

their lies may be great. Pedagogically the teacher must know some- 
thing of the genesis of the lie. Obscurity of ideas, high-sounding 
phrases, pretenses, jeopardize pure love of truth. All children need 
persistent training to and for it. 

Many think that, as Tacitus said of the ancient Germans, good 
customs do more for children than laws do. Some believe that per- 
haps the chief task of the teacher is to enforce and evoke truthful- 
ness, even at the expense of fantasy which often obscures the feeling 
for truth, perhaps most of all at the age of from eight to eleven. 
Liars often have extremely acute intelligence and may lie from a vir- 
tuous motive ; but usually lies are to win more respect and esteem, to 
cover vice, to increase pleasure. Great and little lies must be alike 
condemned. The child's fancy is like the adult's dream. G. Lehne ^ 
deplores the fact that for years his daily playmate was a fancied Herr 
Luft. He was so real that he used to set a chair for him at the 
table; but he regards the nascent period of fantasy as dangerous. 
He would restrict even the use of Marchen, but not quite banish 
them and takes issue with Rein in this respect. Teacher and pupils 
would not live in hostile camps if there was complete trust and the lie 
of fear could be abolished. Indeed, just the punishment for real 
faults might come to have something attractive about it to pupils of a 
highly developed sense of justice. A lie to get things is perhaps 
worse than one to avoid punishment; and envy and jealousy are bad 
motives. The teacher should cultivate the nimbus of infallibility; 
should always keep his promises; should show in all his teaching, 
whether religious or scientific, a profound love of truth ; should avoid 
casuistry and cultivate a strong passion for truth. Rhetorical arts 
are often injurious. Perhaps the greatest punishment for a lie is 
discovery and its consequent shame and the failure to secure the 
result aimed at. To make headway against the lying habit with 
the young we must under no conditions accept any form of the 
doctrine that the end justifies the means. Never alter the truth 
for any cause whatever, and do not pretend to know when you do 
not, should be school mottoes. Children have an exquisite sense 
for detecting the lies in their social environment, and these are very 
corrupting. 

But these rather obvious and slightly platitudinous precepts are 
not enough and the time for regarding them as finalities is surely now 
past. Too exiguous insistence upon literal and inerrant veracity is 
not without grave dangers of moral finickiness and superficiality. 
As with most ethical ends, the best methods to attain them are in- 
direct; and teachers who exhort to truthfulness, set the best ex- 
amples of it, and condemn all forms of lying — and no more than this 
— are crude amateurs in this field and indeed, should be condemned 
as remiss if they do no more. 

' Wie kann der Lehrer die Liigenhaftigkeit der Jugend bekampfen. Die 
Kinderfehler, 1902, vol. 7, pp. 58-74. 



CHILDREN'S LIES 387 

Demoor, in his admirable treatise ^ thinks that muscle train- 
ing is the most effective means not only of developing the brain 
power, but of cultivating honesty. He v^ould have liars ex- 
cluded from school, like those suffering from nervous or con- 
tagious diseases, and would form special classes for all those 
who cannot be subjected to the ordinary educational method 
but need special treatment. An active life, a richly furnished 
field of knowledge, full of things of absorbing interest that 
stimuluate observation so that children are provided and will 
not have to fabricate experiences in order to get psychic room 
to live in — these will act as wholesome food does in reducing 
the propensity to have recourse to strong drink. Besides facts 
and science there must be plenty of good jfiction, poetry, 
romance, myth, to feed the imagination in a legitimate way. 
The child must have access to an ideal world or its soul is 
smoldered and atrophied unless it can invent such a world 
of its own. Life about and in the child should teem with 
interests and not be void of excitements. Hence a juiceless 
curriculum, a prosaic diet of dead facts and deader rules and 
laws, monotonous drill, zestless, enforced drudgery, to escape 
which there are so many licensed but dishonest ways among 
children, crude teaching about the obligation of truthfulness 
that bottles up the fancy — these are direct provocatives of sev- 
eral of the different modes of lying. Finally, as the worst lies 
are to conceal faults, bad habits, perhaps vices, so that they 
may grow rankly in secret, everything that tends to prevent or 
eradicate such moral defects so that there is nothing which 
needs concealment, helps; so does the gratification of every 
legitimate wish, to forbid which is often a temptation to secret 
indulgence.^ 

' Jean Demoor: Die abnormalen Kinder und ihre erziehliche Behandlung in 
Haus und Schule. Bonde, Altenburg, 1901, 292 p. 

^ Beitrage zur Kenntnis und Kasuistik des Pseudologia phantastica von Anna 
Stemmermann. AUg. Zeit. f. Psychiatric, 1907, vol. 64, pp. 69-110. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 

The vast body of sex thought in folklore and how it permeates the ages 
to our children — The new epoch in sex psychology and pedagogy in 
Freud and the Mannheim Conference — The movement in Germany 
in literature, society, and the schools — Other countries — Progressive 
sterility of the Occidental nations — New radical theories of sex and 
family life — Use of the disease factor in sex pedagogy — Latest esti- 
mates as to the prevalence of these diseases in our land and others 
— The new duty of physicians — The place of eugenics in pedagogy — 
New views and theories of human breeding — Heredity — Stirpiculture 
— The new movement in keeping and studying pedigrees — Special 
pedagogy of sex before puberty with special reference to the Freud 
school — Relations of love and sex — The great strain of sex eclair- 
cissement, especially for delicate girls — Periodicity — Difference be- 
tween sexes — The pedagogy of self-abuse — Nocturnal experiences — 
Sex .periodicity in young men — Bachelor men and women and race 
suicide — Late marriages — Nature of puberty — Chief stress laid upon 
long-circuiting and sublimation — Education for wedlock — Origin and 
function of shame — The psychology of pregnancy — Studies of one 
hundred mothers and one hundred fathers during this period — Defi- 
nition of good fatherhood — How husbands and wives weigh each 
other by new standards when parenthood approaches — Parturition — 
The first sight and first cry of the baby — Nursing — Confessions of 
representative mothers. 

The most difficult, delicate, and at the same time the most 
important part of moral education is that which concerns sex — 
difficult because so complex and little understood, delicate be- 
cause the facts in the field are so concealed by reticence, 
prudery, and lies, and important because conditioning the most 
vital interests of the individual and the future of the race. In 
the place of the old taboo and reserve, recent years have been 
marked by a new frankness, candor, and openness of mind, and 
by discussions more serious and more competent than have 
ever been known in the world's history. Science has shed a 
flood of light on the biological, physiological, and psychological 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 3^9 

nature and manifestations of sex. Sociology has shown how 
it underhes national and racial weal and perpetuity. The 
progressive sterility of all the most highly civilized nations has 
called startled attention to the subject as perhaps the culmina- 
ting aspect of the higher statecraft. Other special studies 
have shown how urban life, in which a constantly increasing 
proportion of the population of all cultured lands lives, makes 
a new and perilous situation for the young and increases their 
precocity. Special surveys have brought out the facts and 
figures concerning the prevalence of both vicious practices and 
of diseases; and school life itself is found not to be morally 
hygienic in this respect. Society is slowly awakening to a 
new consciousness in this new situation. The laws of heredity, 
now well made out in the general field of biology, are being 
applied to man ; eugenic journals and societies are inaugurating 
hopeful lines of practical endeavor; and campaigns against 
various aspects of the social evil, diseases, and the porno- 
graphic element in literature, art, and the drama are being 
waged in the interests of the young. The vital relations be- 
tween religion and sex are slowly being realized, and purity 
agencies are becoming wiser and more effective, so that our 
underlying moral concepts in this field are in the process of 
rapid transformation and enlargement. 

Of all the cultivated classes in the community, educators 
alone remain not only timid and inactive, but uninformed and 
prone to the old easy way of ignoring the facts, repressing 
discussion, minimizing dangers, and sometimes reaffirming the 
laisses alter policy of the old days of ignorance concerning the 
dominion and pervasiveness of sex functions in the psycho- 
physic constitution of man. Next to teachers, parents are 
probably, in this regard, most oblivious of facts and most 
apathetic and recreant in their duties toward their children. 
The clergy are at last very slowly being awakened to their 
duties here. Most anomalous, however, is the attitude of the 
large portion of the American press. While many dailies, 
weeklies, and even monthlies still print quack advertisements 
that are obnoxious to morals, and give great prominence to 
scandals and sensational and indecent divorce proceedings that 
are still more corrupting, some of them exclude by explicit 
office rules every report of medical and scientific publications, 



39° EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

meetings and conferences in which this topic is treated by ex- 
perts, and where the main endeavor is to diffuse wholesome 
facts which old and young need to know. 

The world has probably never known any such universal 
consensus as the present belief in education. To-day all 
classes and conditions of men in all lands believe in schools 
and teaching and acknowledge that in all fields knowledge is 
the guide to successful living and that ignorance is not only 
a disgrace but a weakness and a danger. In this one domain 
of life and in one alone — and that the most important of all — 
it would almost seem as if civilized man was afraid of knowl- 
edge, laid a heavy ban upon instruction and deliberately chose 
darkness rather than light. Teachers who have the rarest 
opportunities to observe have learned nothing and ignore the 
subject. Text-books on psychology and pedagogy rarely men- 
tion it, so that our children are generally educated as if they 
were of the neuter gender. The sex instinct is so ignored 
that schoolmistresses have been caricatured as regarding sex 
as " an indiscretion if not a positive impropriety on the part 
of the Creator." Meanwhile the seeds of vice were never 
sown so plentifully. The diminution of hard physical toil by 
machines, the wastrel life and vicious example of the rich and 
idle and their gilded and usually degenerate offspring as if 
there was a direct ratio between leisure and sexual vice, com- 
mon living rooms in the slums and precocity are keeping 
armies of young men from coming into their birthright and 
arresting them as underlings in the industrial world because, 
as Mr. Acher ^ has well shown, their vitality is burned out by 
the fires of lust — all these contribute. Every modern expert 
authority, without one exception that I can find, agrees that 
sex is the most imperious and all-pervading instinct in man; 
that nothing so conditions his individual and social life; that 
it supplies the strongest motivation to attain eminence, acquire 
property, found a home; that it makes art, science, altruism, 
moral and religious life which cannot be understood without 
knowing its primary and secondary qualities. It is strongly 
sexed men and women in the period of their maturity and 
vigor that have done most of the great and good work of the 

^ The Psychology, Pedagogy, and Hygiene of Sex Development (in press). 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 39^ 

world and done it because they were sexed, since nothing in 
the soul of man is so susceptible of transformation or has 
so many higher psychokinetic equivalents. For this reason 
nothing in us needs education and guidance in this plastic nas- 
cent period so much as this propensity which is most of all 
denied it. 

We now know that sex life begins in infancy long before 
it has any localization in the erogenic zones ; that its erethism 
may be stimulated by the pacificator or stoppered rubber nipple 
as early as the sucking age ; that half a dozen other forms of 
what Moll calls " the detumescence instinct " may be culti- 
vated unawares before it is directed toward or dependent upon 
other persons, that is, before the contrectation stage unfolds — 
and this in boys and girls alike before anything formerly called 
sex makes its appearance; we know that adolescent males, a 
large majority of whom (Cohen thinks 95^) yield to some 
form of self-abuse, are usually tortured with morbid fears 
that even doctors (since Tissot, Lallemand, Voltaire, and the 
anonymous author of " Onania " who a century ago or more 
painted its effects in lurid colors) have too often shared and 
increased, when in fact not one of the many diseases once 
ascribed to this cause are due to it, save in those with strong 
hereditary predisposition toward these ailments. The psychic 
effects of this vicious practice due to ignorance may be bad 
enough, and psychotherapy performs many, if not most, of its 
greatest miracles by chirping up those under this obsession, 
so that it would be relatively ineffective but for nervous 
scares due to departure from conventional norms. We know 
too that young women suffer many, if not most, of their ail- 
ments of body and soul from perversions, interdictions of 
functional abnormalities in this sphere, from all of which early 
and happy wedlock would absolve them. We understand as 
never before the physical and psychic evils of promiscuity, also 
the very wide range of individual variations in the vigor and 
manifestations of this instinct even within the limits of nor- 
mality. For each one of the above views one could easily cite 
scores of experts agreeing with none dissenting, and who urge 
with one accord that the psychological moment has fully come 
when the western world must be awakened to a renaissance 
both intellectual and moral in this domain. 



392 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

To realize how much sex has occupied the minds of man- 
kind one needs to be famiHar only with the thoughts and 
language of sailors, soldiers, prisoners, students, and other 
classes of men more or less isolated from female society. 
Under such conditions conversation often reeks with obscenities 
of every sort almost as if there was some degree of sexual 
satisfaction obtained in this vicarious way, or as if enforced 
repression in these conditions of life overflowed into coarseness 
of speech. One needs also to scan the history and literature 
of decadent races in the stages of national decline or certain 
contemporary plays during corrupt periods. Sodom, Babylon, 
Pompeii, the later Roman Empire, became very corrupt, and 
so their literature and art abound in shamelessness of a kind 
that shocks modern ideas of decency. These things show at 
least how central sex may become in human consciousness. 
Moreover, we have now several systematic collections of folk- 
lore, customs, etc.,^ that show that to-day in many, if not most, 
countries at least of continental Europe, there is an extended 
body of oral and sometimes written tradition so rank that it 
would in some lands to-day be a crime to print and circulate 
it. This matter, much of it, is of great age, having lived for 
countless generations from mouth to ear, for much was never 
printed before — this at least we infer from the close similarity 
of many of the ancient and modern data. Thus its persistence 
and currency almost parallels that of speech itself. Its 
copiousness and variety is amazing. There are erotic lexicons 
and idiotica showing how very numerous are the terms for 
every part, act, aspect and relation of the vita sexualis. There 
is often a rather surprising ingenuity in the construction of 
these usually quintessentially slangy vocabularies. There are 
very studied riddles, acrostics, anagrams, puzzles and poems 
ranging all the way from vulgar doggerel to more or less 
belabored and scholarly poems, dramas, tales, etc. (cf. Lord 



* Anthropophyteia, Jahrbiicher fiir folkloristische Erhebungen und For- 
schungen zur Entwicklunggeschichte der geschlechtlichen Moral, herausgegeben 
von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss. Leipzig, Deutsche Verlags-Aktien-Gesellschaft, 
1904—09, 6 vols. See also Beivs^erke zum Studium der Anthropophyteia, herausge- 
geben von Dr. Friedrich S. Krauss. Leipzig, Deutsche Verlags-Aktien-Gesell- 
schaft, 1907-09, 3 vols. See also Kruptadia; recueil de documents pour servir a 
I'etude des traditions populaires. Paris, Welter, 1883-1907, 11 vols. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 393 

Rochester's abominable Sodom reflecting the indescribable cor- 
ruption of the court of Charles the Second). There are 
figures of speech, jests, jokes, gibes, and every salacious form 
of wit which Freud thinks in its more original form took its 
departure from this domain. There are fables, also pictures, 
generally rude and scrawled on walls and perhaps retirades, 
but sometimes executed with much artistic skill, symbols in 
which this kind of psychosis is very prolific, yarns and contes 
that would put Boccaccio to shame, sedoeological designations 
grossly used, and suggestions that besmirch everything. In 
this inexhaustible mine, too, we find erotic dances, a field 
where invention has a very wide scope which it has made the 
most of and which, when taken together with seductive 
gestures and dress, make an important addition to every 
alliimeuse agency. Moreover, there are coins that have to be 
secluded from modern numismatic collections, tattooing where 
the human skin itself has been used as parchment to inscribe 
almost everything that is gross — these things have been spun 
about every part of every organ — normal and abnormal — every 
stage, posture, aspect, condition and circumstance of sexual 
activity itself and every age of life. Such topics as 
menstruation, virginity, pregnancy, temptation, and even in- 
cest, perversions, every unnatural practice, pomology, sex 
diseases, abortions, preventives, even anatomical abnormalities 
and peculiarities are made the nuclei of accretions, new and 
old, almost always treated, too, which is perhaps worst of all, 
in a cynical and sometimes more or less jocular way. Not 
only sex but excremental functions also come in for their own 
large share of attention, which bears witness to the way in 
which this process impressed primitive and still affects modern 
man. 

Thus all this painful and all too voluminous section of 
anthropology shows by unmistakable documentation how close 
sex has been, and still is to great groups and classes of men 
perhaps the topic of most absorbing interest, occupying and in 
a sense stimulating a vast amount of mentation, a theme of 
perennial zest, of incessant conversation, a kind of sinister folk 
muse, inspiring a low but profuse kind of productiveness as 
well as presiding over the .transmission of story roots galore, 
endlessly varied, now refined and now crassified in form. 



r- 



394 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Much of the grossest of this stock material is reproduced in 
sometimes more, sometimes less sublimated form in club 
anecdotes or even in the literature that Anthony Comstock 
burns by the ton. From this point of view again we can real- 
ize how sex must have been and still is perhaps the chief apper- 
ception-organ of no very small proportion of mankind. In- 
deed, it is hardly less than startling to realize how widely 
minds of this type can to-day see sex in everything and how 
clever they are in devising ways and means of diffusing sex 
suggestion even over the objects and processes of nature and 
all the leading activities of human life no matter how remote 
from it. It is a remnant of the same psychosis that produced 
the old phallic religions. 

Now this material percolates through all ages and strata of 
society as by constant seepage. From it come the obscenities 
that it is so impossible to eliminate from the environment and 
the lives of our children to-day on the streets, in the schools, and 
back alleys. Its virus may be more or less attenuated, and it 
affects some individuals more and some less acutely. Even 
worse, probably, than the smutty words and images themselves, 
are the spirit and attitude, that come from this old prehistoric 
source, of levity in considering, and disrespect toward, the 
organs and functions connected with the sacred office of trans- 
mitting human life. This ancient lore is rank with contempt 
for woman, body and soul, and with gross misrepresentations 
of her very nature. Nearly all of it represents her as at heart 
sensual, passionate and lustful, but hypocritical, always ready 
to be false to any view or duty if opportunity offers, vying with 
man in bestiality but, unlike him, past master in all the arts 
of ruse, deception, simulation, dissimulation, and conventional 
propriety. If these disguises and pretenses can be broken 
through and with safety and security from exposure, she is 
represented as usually ready to abandon herself to any degree 
or any kind of excess. It is this idea, then, that is one of the 
now most corrupting derivatives of this noxious, teeming mass 
of folk tradition that has survived from the worst ages of the 
worst nations of ancient and modern times and which is passed 
on to our children to-day in direct line of continuity and com- 
munion with the most corrupt heathen and pagan races, to 
whose smut-lore our offspring are now exposed by contagion 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 395 

from their play- and school-mates. It is absorbed because \ 
they are in the same developmental stage in which it grew and 
throve in the race, each chief epoch and feature of which they 
therefore tend so strongly to repeat, at least in petto. They 
are happily usually, at least on their first exposure to it, inno- 
cent and naive. To prevent them from sinking too deep into 
this quagmire is one of the most difficult tasks to-day. The 
virtue of a young boy is thus by these antique hereditary asso- 
ciations closely bound up with this respect for the female sex. 
And it is precisely here that current vulgar sex lore soaks in 
through the associations of middle and later adolescent years 
and gets in its most effective work of subtle disenchantment 
and depreciation of the best things in woman. 

But corrupting as this now is morally, its very devil's- 
dreck is also extremely instructive scientifically because it 
shows us how possible, if not inevitable, it was for mankind 
at a yet more primitive and naive stage of its development 
than history records to sexify everything in nature and in the 
whole domain of human experience. What we have con- 
sidered above is the detritus of a great movement upward 
which decent men and races have achieved by suppression and 
sublimation. The better ethical consensus of man has long- 
tabooed all this and striven to eliminate and purify the proc- 
esses of reproduction by higher esoteric interpretation and by 
spiritualizing the master passion of love. Religion, especially, 
as well as civilization, knowledge, the arts and social institu- 
tions have perhaps not infrequently made their very best con- 
tributions toward this end, which generally needs supreme 
endeavor. Thus these things are the gold of which the old 
grossness is the dross — the one the food, the other the garbage, 
of culture. 

But spiritualization is hard, and the lusts of the flesh are 
the most formidable of all man's foes. The struggle has been 
long and bitter. Perhaps, although its traces are so largely 
eliminated and have to be reconstructed from fragments, it has 
been the greatest of all the achievements of culture history. 
Within recorded ages it has made ascetics and celibates out of 
virile men who throbbed and tingled with passion, but fought 
Apollyon through it all to victory. By struggles, vows, pray- 
ers, falling and rising again, defeats and victories, the various 



396 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

rites, regimens, ceremonies, flagellations, pilgrimages, self- 
mutilations and even castrations, in this field, as it is now being 
reconstructed from so many scattered and fragmentary- 
sources, man has for untold ages toiled, struggled, fought and j 
battled with his desire and yearned and striven upward. 
Probably not even his long conflict with higher animals in 
some Troglodyte stage, when it long seemed doubtful whether 
he or they would be lords of creation, has left so many marks 
and traces of its severity upon his nature as this. Indeed, 
there is something not only mysterious, but sublime in con- 
templating the history of a creature who was thus dowered 
^ with a body of death and a soul of light and who was always 
lapsing but always starting on again and through long ages 
making a little advance, but at terrific cost, since all the stirps, 
tribes, and nations that have perished from the world have 
done so because they failed to solve hygienically aright the 
great problem of sex, or how most effectively to transmit life. 
Surely, man must have had at the very core of his being some 
potent but benign nisus that impelled, at least the chosen rem- 
nants of his race, to forge up this stony and laborious way of 
the cross. We all of us and perhaps especially women, but 
most of all those of them who have not completed the highest 
stages of human development, carry in our natures the me- 
mentos of this struggle in the form of lurking anxieties liable 
to emerge upon occasion and becloud and perhaps often dismal- 
ize life into multiform types of neuroses and hysterics. 

Now, it is into this great conflict that the child enters long 

/ before he is aware ; indeed, inhibition perhaps begins with the 

/ first reproof for interest in the organs of sex and the processes 

A^ ^ / of elimination from the body of both kinds in which, true to 

I the tendency of ontogeny to repeat phylogeny, there is a 

L stage and phase of intense curiosity and interest. From this 
stage of racial history, developed scatological rites, ceremonies 
and religious superstitions; and we have here the cunabulum 
of various other apperception-organs, without which many 
themes in mythology cannot be understood. Perhaps it began 
still earlier by attempting to evoke a sense of shame and 
modesty in the child concerning his own nudity which, by a 
law of nature, he has periods of desiring by a very strong 
instinct animated by a very ancient momentum. And thus 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 397 

the child is launched upon the long- process of repeating the 
greatest psychophysic strain to which man was ever subjected 
in the subordination of elements directly or indirectly con- 
nected with sex to higher powers of control. Afar down in 
the soul where consciousness will perhaps never penetrate, the 
reverberations of this old warfare rack, toss, and perhaps al- 
most tear the soul asunder. Many psychic and physical factors 
now not recognized as sexual were so once, and it is especially 
this that seems by a very interesting and yet to be studied 
law in process of gradual elimination by coming ever earlier 
in the life history of the individual. Some were once pri- 
marily, others perhaps secondarily, sexual in their nature. 
What mature person who has the very rare power of remem- 
bering his own experience when life was hottest, or who has 
enjoyed for years close intimacy with many young men of 
sedentary or student classes, has not acquired a profound sense 
of what a storm and stress many, if not most, of them must 
now pass through as conscience and reason struggle with sense 
for the control of their lives, and when the imagination is 
haunted with visions of Walpurgis night scenes that it is 
almost impossible to exorcise. 

In view of this situation, it seems best, before setting forth 
the pedagogy of sex, to enumerate briefly some of the new 
movements in the field, that we may realize how serious, com- 
petent, and widespread is the present campaign for the sexual 
betterment of the rising generation and how grave is the pres- 
ent need. We begin with Germany, where most has been 
done and where long ago pedagogues like Salzmann, Basedow, 
and others, like Rousseau, in France, demanded sex instruc- 
tion in school. Several comprehensive surveys had shown an 
alarming prevalence not only of sexual immorality among 
youth, but of disease. A large and influential society was 
founded which publishes a journal, now in its eighth year.^ 
The third congress of this society held in Mannheim, May, 
1907, was devoted solely to sex pedagogy where the cultus 
ministers of Prussia and Bavaria were represented and the 
quality and number of attendance and the interest shown ex- 



^ Zeitschrift fiir Bekampfung der Geschlechtskrankheiten, edited by Dr. A. 
Blaschko. Earth, Leipzig, 1903 to date. 



398 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS ' 

ceeded all expectation. There were nineteen papers presented 
by eminent physicians, educators, and others, many of which 
were discussed, and the entire proceedings are printed in a 
stately volume of 321 pages. ^ Among the chief topics were 
sexual instruction in home and school, the nature of the sexual 
awakening in adolescent youth, sexual dietetics, instruction of 
teachers and parents, etc. The clearest and most unanimous 
result of the congress was a deepening sense of the all-condi- 
tioning importance of normal sexual life for racial permanence, 
national growth and prosperity, and for both personal and pub- 
lic hygiene as well as for morals and religion. The magnitude 
and complexity of the subject, the need of coordinating the 
now too isolated and partial view point of physicians, students 
of eugenics or stirpiculture, the home, school, church, etc., so 
that the pooling of present knowledge and methods of meeting 
the evil and the practical getting together of all the agencies 
from purity societies to medical experts in venereal diseases, 
those interested in legislation to control prostitution and those 
who study reproduction from the biological, selectional, and 
psychological point of view, was profoundly realized. There 
was a deep sense of the growing magnitude of all the evils 
and the dangers now impending with the rapid increase of 
urban life and with the extremes of poverty and luxury, and 
a sense that more must be done at once and in the schools, 
despite the fact that the pedagogy of the subject is still unde- 
veloped. 

There was great diversity of opinion, however, con- 
cerning just when to begin, what to teach at first and last, how 
to teach, who should teach and how far to go. Not a voice 
dissented from the conviction that something must be done 
without delay for upper secondary school classes and for 
academic youth. All agreed, too, that some instruction ought 
to be given early and in the home, although it was generally 
granted that the vast majority of parents could not or would 
not perform this duty and that they must be taught where 
possible, and that at all events this theme should be made an 
integral part of the course of study in all normal schools. 



^ Kongress der deutschen Gesellschaft zur Bekampfung der Geschlechtskrank- 
heiten, Sexualpadagogik. Barth, Leipzig, 1907, 321 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 399 

Fear was often expressed that physicians with their terrible 
array of the statistics of vice and their horrible portrayals of 
diseases would be liable to excite morbid fears and also that 
they lacked knowledge or appreciation of the delicate normal 
processes of sex eclaircissement in the pubescent and adoles- 
cent soul and could not appeal sufficiently to the potent factor 
of honor, shame, personal and moral responsibility to self, 
society, and posterity, the sense of duty and the need of 
strengthening the will and the powers of choice. Yet nearly 
all members wanted the physician's authoritative voice heard 
by all boys at least in the later teens, and not a few would 
supplement his teachings by oth^r agencies, and still mpx!^ 
demanded that girls be taught by women physicians. All { 
that shocked, caused depressive discouragement, loss of 
self-respect or courage as sex fanatics often do in their 
allusions to self-abuse, all characterization of perversions 
and unnatural practices, lurid descriptions of the results of; 
onanism (often worse than the vice itself), and all detailedl 
descriptions of diseases or too suggestive and objective^ 
illustrations of sexual processes or organs and, above all, 
premature enlightenment before the age of curiosity an^--^ 
understanding, were deprecated; and forcing this kind 'of 
knowledge upon the immature, undeveloped souls was com- 
pared to forcible defloration which makes directly for pre- 
cocity. Wje jmust follow natural interest and curiosity, 
giving just what is wanted or needed at each stage and no 
more; and to that end we must study more carefully just how 
and in what order the long, complex processes of sex illumi- 
nation occur. Several essayists laid great stress on beginning 
early with the fertilization of plants and proceeding gradually 
to the lower animals and making the first stages of instruction 
incidental to biological teaching which should be more taught 
in general for the sake of the opportunity it affords to teach 
sex indirectly, and thought that even in normal schools this 
topic should be only one chapter in general hygiene and stand 
beside such themes as alcohol, tuberculosis, body-keeping and 
good habits generally. Sex Aufkldrung to be complete must 
have not only a scientific, physiological, prophylactic, but an 
ethical and religious side, and teach the nature and sanctity of 
marriage, the family and all its relations to natural selection 



400 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and its irradiations into the positive form of art and idealism, 
along with its negative side of censure and punishment which 
reprobates all nastiness or suggestiveness of word or act — all 
these are needed. School work in this field should advance 
slowly enough to go surely, for extremes might only cause a 
revulsion of public sentiment against the topic, and a retreat 
after a fair beginning would be disastrous. One speaker 
urged the importance of a carefully prepared canon of reading 
for adolescents which should contain some healthful love 
poems and stories that presented the tender passion at the 
right age in a pure, ideal and heroic way, holding that this 
would be a corrective both of the gushy sentimentality to 
which girls are liable and the grossness of boys and would fill 
the fancy and imagination with noble images and would thus 
tend to counteract the evil. It was urged that there should be 
some sex differentiation in all lists of books advised for boys 
and girls and several called for concise booklets and pamphlets 
on sex for youth of a kind which do not yet exist. There 
were many reports of lecture courses given in the schools of 
different, cities and all without exception had been welcomed 
by pupils, and commended by parents and teachers. While 
instinct guides animals aright, man needs not only the awaken- 
ing of sympathy and feeling of charity, but especially every- 
thing that strengthens the will, for only it can make instruction 
or high ideals of any worth. Hence everything that stim- 
ulates volition (for if it is weak, life grows dull), or that 
hardens resolve to oppose sense and passion should have about 
the first place of all in a comprehensive scheme of sex peda- 
gogy. If this subject is isolated too much there is always 
danger of stimulating this instinct, if the intellect is chiefly 
addressed. Hence character building, which involves firm 
convictions and settled habits of thought, feeling and will, is 
in general the surest prophylactic. Hints have their place at 
the right moment and a very important one, but are not 
sufficient. The hardening of the body is indispensable and 
every kind of physical exercise and active objective life helps. 

Other points discussed were whether in gymnasia the instruction 
should be given in ober secunda, unter prima or to those about to 
graduate only; whether parents should be asked, told, or permitted 
to attend -if they wished to ; or whether their permission should be 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 40i 

asked; whether the teaching should be after school hours or com- 
pulsory; whether the regular teachers should be consulted; whether 
any stage of instruction should be thorough, systematic, and examined 
on or only sketchy. Most thought great stress should be laid on the 
sense of duty and the function of choice, that little reference was 
necessary to the sex act itself or to precautions against contagion, to 
the needs of promptly consulting physicians on occasion, to the de- 
tailed accounts of disease, that parents should not be present, that 
male physicians should not teach girls (an experiment tried by 
Heidenhain at Steglitz, but later forbidden), and that the widespread 
error that use of the function was needful to its conservation should 
be combated. It was brought out that teaching had been officially 
authorized upon this subject in the high schools of Switzerland with 
excellent results, that young male teachers beginning their duties in 
great cities are in great danger of contamination themselves, that 
(as Blaschko's statistics show) university students in Germany led all 
other classes in the percentage of venereal disease, that at the uni- 
versity of Bonn attendance upon instruction on this subject was 
required of all the members of the philological seminary, which is the 
nursery of teachers of the ancient languages. 

The Natural History Conference held at Stuttgart a little later 
in 1906 authorized a memorandum advising that instruction on this 
subject in school be general rather than detailed and come near the 
close of the school period. It is feared that the imagination of the 
innocent will be injured by much class instruction. Leaflets, how- 
ever, are recommended which can be utilized together with instruc- 
tion for those individuals whom teachers deem in need of it. This 
instruction should not be very detailed but should (a) emphasize the 
importance of procreation for the welfare of posterity and should be 
made a matter of high ethical responsibility; (b) it should teach that 
indulgence is by no means a physiological necessity but that large 
numbers of the greatest and best men have abstained during their 
lifetime without injury. The dangers, too, of extra-marital relations 
should be taught. The peril of illicit relations for morals and for 
health and the nature of the two chief diseases should be inculcated.^ 
The great majority do not know how or what to teach. For such a 



1 A. Forel: Die sexuelle Frage. Reinhardt, Miinchen, 1905, 587 p. 

F. Siebert: Ein Buch fur Eltern. Seitz, Miinchen, 1903-4, 3 vols. 

H. Wegener: Wir jungen Manner. Langewiesche, Leipzig, 1906, 216 p. 

Die Tatigkeit der Unterrichtskommission der Gesellschaft deutscher Natur- 
forscherund Arzte, hrsg. von A. Gutzmer. Teubner, Leipzig, 1908, p. 218 et seq. 

A. Foumier: Was hat der Vater seinem i8-jahrigen Sohne zu sagen? Aus dem 
franzosischen iibersetzt von Dr. C. Ravasini. Dietz, Stuttgart, 1905, 32 p. 

Bastian Schmid: Gedanken zur sexuellen Padagogik. Zeits. f. lateinlose hohere 
Schulen, 1905-06, vol. 17, pp. 99-303. 

ZwNaturund Schule: Teubner, Leipzig, 1906, vol. 5: a. H. Most: Zur sexuellen 
Padagogik, pp. 40-42. b. M. Kleinschmidt: Die sexuelle Frage in der Erziehung 
37 



402 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

few very brief manuals suggesting methods, matter and gradation 
are now provided and more are needed. I know nothing in English 
quite as good as the following in German, one or more of which 
should be translated. They are: Die geschlechtliche Aufkldrung in 
Haus und S chide, von H. Fiirth; Eine Mutterpflicht, von E. Stiehl; 
and Beim Onkel Doktor auf dent Lande, von M. E. G. Okei-Blom. 
Konrad Holler : Die sexuelle Frage und die Schule, Leipzig. See 
also C. R. Henderson: 8th Year Book of the National Society for 
the Study of Education, ipop. Also Helen Putnam, Boston Medical 
and Surgical Journal, Jan. 21, 1906. Also Moll : Die sexuelle Ersieh- 
ung. Zeitsch. f. pad. Psychol., December, 1908. The younger the 
child the less fitting it is to rely upon the family physician or the 
pastor, who is more remote from the family circle. 

Although instruction in sexual hygiene is not yet incor- 
porated into the official programme of Germany, Diisseldorf, 
Leipzig, Dresden, and other cities have tried such courses for 
graduating classes for the Gymnasia, Real and Biirger Schulen 
by carefully selected physicians with the best results, as testi- 
fied not only by attendance but by general expressions of deep 
interest and profit from the pupils. So successful have these 
courses been that it is now proposed to extend the experiments 
to the upper classes of the Volks-Schulen and Fortbildungs- 

des Kindes, pp. 70-78. c. F. Siebert: Die sexuelle Frage in die Erziehung des 
Kindes, pp. 150-159. 

Pubertat und Schule, by A. Cramer. Leipzig, Teubner, 19 10, 16 p. Also 
Studies in the Psychology of Sex, by Havelock Ellis, vol. 6, Sex in Relation to 
Society. Philadelphia, T. A. Davis, 1910, 656 p. Also Das sexuelle Problem und 
seine moderne Krise, von E. Mertens. Munich, Kupferschmid, 1910, 476 p. 
Also the Sexual Life of Woman, by E. Heinrich Kisch. Authorized translation 
into English by M. Eden Paul. New York, Rebman Company, 19 10, 686 p. 

Werkblatt zur Handhabung der sexuellen Aufklarung an h5heren Unter- 
richtsanstalten. Entworfen von der Unterrichtskommission der Gesellschaft 
deutscher Naturforscher and Arzte. Uberreicht der 78. Naturforscher - Ver- 
sammlung in Stuttgart, 1906. In Zeitsch. d. deutsch-evangelischen Vereine z. 
Forderung der Sittlichkeit, 15. Januar, 1908, 22. Jahrgang, Nr. i. 

For a typically radical method see that of a well-known German teacher, Maria 
Lischnewska from Mannheim (Die geschlechtliche Belehrung der Kinder; zur Ge- 
schichte und Methodik des Gedankens. Mutterschutz, 1905, vol. i, pp. 137-170) 
who has composed a very methodic course in sex instruction which begins in the 
third school year and which starts from the impregnation of the barnyard fowl, 
which must be presented in " anschauliche Weise, " and exhibits a picture of the 
child in its mother's body "which every school must have." In the fifth and 
sixth school year the process must be presented in cattle and the sex organs must 
be exhibited " in simple drawings, " and finally, in the seventh and eighth school year 
the process in man must be also presented object-lessonwise. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 403 

Schulen. In Helsingfors at the instigation of Dr. Oker-Blom, 
such instruction is now given to the upper classes in girls' 
schools just before graduation by lady teachers especially 
trained for that purpose. 

The Prussian Cultus Minister has issued a request for 
information concerning the " scope and kind of instruction on 
sex given at the present time in schools, where and in what 
places it is given and by whom." In the returns, these 
methods fall into three groups : ( i ) instruction based on 
purely ethical grounds or upon the seventh commandment; (2) 
physiological instruction (a) concerning healthful sex life and 
procreation and {h) morbid manifestations of this function. 
The results of this inquiry which was issued only in the fall 
of 1907 have not been published.^ Meanwhile, in some parts 
of Germany beginning with Breslau, since certain recent 
charges against the morality of the army, such instruction has 
been given to officers who are thereby qualified and exhorted 
to pass the instruction on to the soldiers under their command, 
and the Prussian Minister of War has authorized such lectures 
elsewhere. The interest and advantage of these courses is 
highly prized and praised by the officers themselves. Not 
only are the troops greatly profited and to some extent safe- 
guarded during their term of compulsory service, which is now 
made as educative as possible in this and other ways, but 
officers are exhorted to be teachers and to feel more responsible 
for the hygiene and morals of those under their command. 
It is stated that when soldiers now go home they are proving 
effective propagandists of better knowledge, each in his own 
circle of family and friends. 

D. Sarason, of Berlin,^ urged that nothing can exceed the im- 
portance of normalizing man's sexual instinct which is the basis of 
human well-being and that during the critical years of youth this 
kind of training should take precedence of everything else. The 
instinct that dominates this field is, however, so imponderable that 
analytic methods of treating it are dangerous so that its proper 
pedagogy must be something quite unique without following at all 
the educative methods in vogue in any of the current courses of 

^ Zeitsch. f. Kinderforschung, Oktober, 1907, p. 28. 

^ Zum Problem der Sexualbelehrung. Zeits. f. Schulgesundheitspflege, 1907, 
vol. 20, pp. 733-746. 



404 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

public education. The instinct must be treated not merely as a 
propensity but as containing the promise and potency of most that 
is best in the individual and social life of man. Nature has screened 
it with mystery, awe, modesty, and if that delicate texture is torn 
ruthlessly away, then like the unveiled statue of Sais, horror is re- 
vealed, (a) When should instruction begin? He answers that in a 
precautionary and negative way it cannot possibly begin too early, 
for everything in the life of the youngest school child that tends 
toward premature or overdevelopment of this part of his nature 
should be carefully prevented. In pubescent years, instruction should 
be only elementary and also chiefly preventive and sex dietetics 
should cover the entire life of the child and therefore be largely 
out of school. For parents to do this, however, would require a 
moral and religious regeneration of the entire German people and 
altruism and self-sacrifice like that seen in the sixteenth and again 
in the last half of the nineteenth century. Now, however, we must 
look chiefly to the school and here fight sexual ignorance just as we 
do illiteracy, (b) Who shall give such instruction? For elementary 
classes the teacher should be trained to do so and the physician 
should be reserved for older children and for those leaving school. 
Every pupil in higher secondary institutions should be required to 
take such a course. Not one should be exempt. Both instruction 
and attendance should be legally obligatory. Medical schools should 
open brief lecture courses to train young physicians to give such 
instruction that the teaching be effectively and comprehensively given 
perhaps in relation to temperance and hygiene, rest, fatigue, work, 
exercise, food, sleep, clothing, etc. (c) How should it be taught? 
Briefly, in connection with a sense of honor and responsibility and 
not as a course apart and sui generis till puberty. The details of 
what to teach, how far, how, ought to be discussed and determined. 
Hence, monographs like Kraepelin's should be multiplied and prizes 
offered by members for suitable curricula and syllabi. 

In 1905 a group of German savants under the lead of 
Helena Stocker, Ph.D., founded a monthly journal (Mutter- 
schitts) to alleviate the state of mothers, married or single, 
who were in dire distress. They studied the status of the 
wives of the poor, those with cruel or criminal husbands, and 
of the unmarried, who during pregnancy and in childbirth 
suffered physical and mental hardships. Here they found 
under modern conditions some of the saddest and most tragic 
aspects of civilization. As these results proceeded they real- 
ized more and more clearly that vast and complex legal, 
economic, social and moral problems were involved, but they 
also found that all the norms for all the reforms needed must 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 405 

be those which spring from the needs of the children and 
that even the protection of the mothers must be for the sake 
of their offspring. Hence after three years the focus of 
their endeavor was changed, and in January, 1908, the jour- 
nal took the name of Die Neue Generation, and its scope was 
enlarged. 

What is the real programme of this group of very earnest, 
able and scholarly women and men who thus boldly address 
themselves to the profound and delicate task of revising all the 
relations involved in this holiest of all functions of transmis- 
sion of human life? First of all — apologizing to these 
German reformers that such a statement is necessary in this 
country — those responsible for this movement are to the best 
of our knowledge and belief of the very highest and most 
stainless personal reputation, according to all the standards of 
the strictest existing moral codes. No breath of suspicion, 
even by their many and bitter critics, has ever been suggested 
against the purity of their lives, and they would abhor no less, 
if not more, than their critics, anything approaching free love 
in the sense in which that term is understood here. We say 
this at the outset because of the inveterate tendency to suspect 
lurking apologetic motives to justify inclinations for individ- 
ual indulgence, present or prospective. Of the disinterested 
and philanthropic motives that animate this movement there 
can therefore be no question. In matters that touch the human 
heart perhaps more deeply than any other these people strive 
to maintain a cool, judicial attitude, and to be not only dis- 
passionate but almost academic, without having any of the' 
aloofness that this term sometimes suggests from the hard, 
bitter, yet ominous facts in this field. 

What are these ? One is that a large proportion of health- 
ful women in the child-bearing age — Dr. Stocker says one half 
in Germany — are now living either in celibacy with all the 
wifely and motherly instincts repressed and it may be per- 
verted, or in prostitution, open or clandestine, or in relations 
involving infraction of the existing laws of marital fidelity. 
Many of them bear illegitimate children with all the psychic 
pain and stigmata this now involves, or are divorced or aban- 
doned wives. This fact, they believe, justifies them in con- 
cluding that marriage as it exists to-day, and especially for 



4o6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

this large and perhaps growing proportion of the community 
must be remodeled to fit life. The interests and virtue of 
posterity are primarily concerned and yet inveterate customs 
and legal and religious sanctions of the existing status of 
wedlock make the community more sensitive to every hint of 
modification of this than of any other institution or relation 
of life, fearful lest changes here would involve more or less 
concession to passion. 

How, then, can this stupendous and delicate task best be 
approached ? The answer offered is, first, by a deepening and 
refining of the moral sense and making the responsibility in- 
volved in parenthood the supreme consideration. We must 
go back of laws and rights and ask what principles underlie 
matrimony and what are the chief ends it was established to 
accomplish. This is summed up in the phrase " responsibility 
to the unborn." This must be the touchstone by which the 
soundness of all opinions discussed and the practical value of 
all changes made must be tested. Every father must feel and 
exercise the fullest responsibility for his children during their 
entire period of immaturity. To shirk this, and especially to 
throw it upon some helpless victim of his passion, is the essence 
of dishonor and scoundrelism ; this being granted, very much 
is assured, for it would inconceivably elevate the status of 
sexual morality. Again, woman must be given an independ- 
ent financial status as well as education, for only when both 
sexes are thus matured, intelligent, of like social standing and 
free, can the best results be assured. They would, however, 
have all lovers eroticists of the ideal. Divorce should be made 
easier for those who are mismated. It is inevitable so long 
as marriage is so ill-considered and so often based on passion. 
One of the first and surest signs of degeneration in a stirp or 
race is want of wisdom in choosing mates ; and the best sign 
of the perpetuity of a race is the unerring instinct that finds 
out and cleaves to the right party with true affinity of body 
and soul; for this alone is true marriage, because only under 
such conditions are the best children produced and reared. 
There may even be conditions where unions have been sanc- 
tioned or unsanctioned by the State or Church, in which child- 
birth is definitely renounced in advance in the interests of 
posterity; but of this little is said. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 407 

Thus this journal does not scruple to discuss even the preventives 
now^ used throughout the v^orld, savage and civilized, and abortions 
in both their medical and social aspects. Perhaps its chief sympa- 
thies, however, are for w^omen who have been deserted, for those who 
are the victims of midwives and quacks, who are infected by their 
husbands, forced to bear too many children, the incessant tempta- 
tions to which girls and young women are exposed. Indeed, these 
topics are discussed not only by the large and influential society 
above referred to, but they find place now in some German peda- 
gogical journals such as Die Neue dcutsche S chide which has de- 
veloped one of the sanest of all schemes of sex instruction in schools 
and would chiefly stress purity and cleanliness, would divine and 
answer children's curiosity and particularly would strengthen the 
will and invest the whole topic of sex and reproduction with mystery 
and with religious sanctity, holding that the present evils are due 
more to weakness of will and sense of duty than to ignorance. The 
instinct of shame should be especially guarded. 

The arts of the temptresses, the careers of the great courtesans 
of history, fiction and the drama, are studied for the fuller light 
they throw upon the social evil. To orphanages and homes for aban- 
doned children — their support, spirit, etc. — some space is given. 
Obscenity is to be warred on and banished as now; but the nude 
in high art can perhaps be encouraged in the interests of morality. 
One extremist advocates occasional gymnastic exhibitions without 
clothes, where the young people shall expose themselves naked to 
the others of their sex in the interests of body culture. The human 
form, he holds, will thus be developed by persistent exercise and the 
misshapen physique of the modern boy or girl will be greatly im- 
proved. No one advocates trial marriages ; but some would have all 
bachelors of means, beyond a certain age, if they produce no ade- 
quate justification of their selfishness in remaining single, taxed. 
Woman's industry in its relations to maternity is a line of active 
agitation. So, too, is the method, matter, and age of sex education. 
The psychology and ethics of celibacy and abstinence are discussed, 
and the evils of the latter, particularly for women, are shown. 
Motherhood should be made a vocation, and each girl should be pre- 
pared for it, whatever other education she may receive. So different 
are men and women that the sexes might be called two nations of 
very diverse stock living together, but nevertheless with a good deal 
of ignorance of each other. Our present morality is man-made; and 
woman's ethical code like her psychology is as yet undeveloped. In 
all these fields the editors and contributors hold constantly before 
themselves the " green peril " which is radicalism in sex theories. 

One department of this journal, entitled " Notes of the Day " is 
devoted to current cases from the press, in which women have suf- 
fered, especially as revealed in courts, from the inhumanity of man 
and from the present double standards. Here scores of pathetic 
individual cases are briefly recited. 



4o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Another department is devoted to the review of novels, dramas, 
and other current literature, books, monographs, articles, etc., touch- 
ing sex questions. Here the standard of criticism is very liberal as 
if from fear of prudery. In general, in these pages it is surprising 
to see how teemingly fecund the German press now is in literature 
of this class. 

When Mutterschutz divided, Die Neue Generation re- 
viewed above became an organ for a society for the protection 
of motherhood; and the more scientific problems were rel- 
egated to another monthly journal of about the same size 
entitled Sexuelle Prohleme, edited by Max Marcuse, M.D., 
which began in January, 1908, and is devoted to the science 
and practical policy of the vita sexiialis. Here sex questions 
are discussed from a fundamentally male standpoint and by 
men, mainly physicians; and more stress is laid upon the 
hygiene of marriage, so that the reformatory motive is perhaps 
rather less prominent. In these two journals which have 
bifurcated from Mutterschuts, one becoming scientific and 
masculine, the other feminine, but both devoted to the same 
general topic, we have a most noteworthy instance of observed 
differences between the male and the female mind in method, 
J — 4natter, emphasis, etc. In the former journal we have full dis- 
cussions of castration, hermaphroditism, homosexuality, and 
other abnormalities in their Tegal, social and psychological 
/ aspects, incest, relations between nearest blood relatives to 
inbreeding, exogamy, and the extreme limits of fertility in 
crossing. The nature of libido most now hold, may not 
only endure but thrive on abstinence, save in neurotic subjects. 
Prostitution, one writer holds, is on the whole beneficial to the 
community because it either kills or sterilizes the unmoral, the 
immoral, and those precociously or abnormally sexual, and 
thus prevents them from contributing to the perpetuity of the 
race. Retardation of the age of sex maturity is held to be in 
the interests of progress, for it is in the direction in which the 
race is tending. Nursing tends to postpone pregnancy and 
so increases the interval betw^een births, and thus in this way 
as well as because mother's milk so greatly conduces to viabil- 
ity makes for better offspring. Other topics discussed are 
sexual dreams. Sadism, masochism, medico-legal cases involv- 
ing sex relations, Jack-the-Ripper records, the psychology of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 409 

infanticide, what constitutes being high or low bred, the rela- 
tion of sexual disorders to hysteria, consumption, and other 
diseases, the modes of mitigating syphilis and gonorrhea. All 
girls should be taught clearly and authoritatively the hygiene 
of the lunar month, just beforehand, briefly, and when the first 
experience comes, more fully, so that they may avoid the errors 
due to ignorance which are often so costly to health during 
the often rather long period of months and occasionally even 
years before the normal rhythm has been well established. 
No period of girlhood is so critical or so sensitive. Precept 
at first should always be personal and if possible maternal, for 
at no stage in the life history of woman is she so plastic or 
susceptible. Hence this topic should be given prominence in 
all mothers' classes. The eminent German jurist, von Liszt, 
proposes to legally penalize men who infect women with their 
own not yet cured diseases, provided such men have been 
instructed concerning the dangers, in the hope that though 
convictions be hard and few, a sense of responsibility in this 
respect now so feeble may be awakened. Judges are now not 
only enforcing more and more the existing laws, but in impos- 
ing penalties for their infractions are considering not only the 
direct physical damages but also the shame, humiliation and 
psychic pain caused to the victim, and this is strongly advo- 
cated with promising results by Professor Helwig, of Berlin, 
for all Prussia. Professor Ehrenfels thinks the West is in 
danger of being surpassed by the East, because in China and 
Japan practically all w^omen of child-bearing age are bearing 
children, and even goes so far as to propose certain immunities 
and rewards for the very most vigorous, educated young men 
who have passed a medical examination. 

Far, indeed, be it from the present writer to indorse all the 
above views, or the yet more radical ones which he forbears 
here to mention; but they are all well meant because their 
purpose is to reduce vice and disease and to increase the 
fecundity of the best and diminish that of the worst classes of 
population in the interests of national efficiency and the father- 
land, of the army, of industry, and success in the colonies, etc. 
This movement, which is represented by yet other journals, 
societies, and publications too numerous to mention and which 
rests on a new scientific view of sex, which this is not the 



4IO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

place to discuss, it is hardly too much to designate as a great 
moral awakening. Germany may not be a greater sinner than 
other lands, but it far excels all others in careful statistical 
studies and various social surveys which have brought it more 
self-knowledge. Suffice it here to say that the specific move- 
ment there to have definite instruction in sex rests upon a tidal 
wave of new interest and insight which at present seems to 
bear some promise of rather radically reconstructing present 
ideas and even institutions involving the relations of sex. 
Based as the German agitation is upon solid biological, phys- 
iological, and sociological science, it is also ethical and national 
in the broadest and deepest sense. The consciousness and the 
conscience of the race have been touched. We cannot treat of 
the many components or even enumerate the agencies that are 
diffusing enlightenment among all classes. The most con- 
servative and even the governmental authorities are tolerating 
and listening to various drastic schemes of reform, and read- 
ing plain-spoken literature with a growing sense that some- 
thing radical must be done, and that new departures impend. 
Thus the more special problems of sex pedagogy in the school 
have behind them in Gerrnany not only a large body of knowl- 
edge, but an intense new ethical momentum. 

Meanwhile, in other lands a sense of the need and danger, 
if less accurately demonstrated for those who demand proof 
and shared by a far smaller proportion of the intelligent popu- 
lation, is nevertheless profoundly realized; and small though 
rapidly growing groups of physicians, social workers, etc., 
have organized many practical agencies that are far wiser and 
more effective than the type of purity societies of a quarter 
of a century ago, and which have devised a new kind of litera- 
ture for the young, viz., the few-paged leaflet in place of the 
diffuse and unauthoritative dollar books for the young by in- 
expert religionists and philanthropists. In France sex ques- 
tions are now discussed, although somewhat incidentally, in 
the I' Education Familiale ^ now in its tenth year, and in the 
Bulletin Trimestriel de la Societe Protectrice de I'Enfance 
Anormale. The French also have a Congres International 



^ J. Renault : Comment preparer I'enfant au respect des questions sexuelles. 
Education Familiale, 1907, vol. 8, pp. 232-238 and 293-296. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 4" 

centre la Pornographie. This has many branches: fourteen 
in Germany, one in England, two in Belgium, one in Den- 
mark, forty-two in France, five in Holland, four in Swit- 
zerland, etc. Its purpose is to prevent the manufacture and- 
sale or distribution of literature, art, etc., that is indecent or 
suggestive, and to bring justice to those who offend the laws 
in this respect.^ In England, besides direct religious and 
moral agencies, eugenics represented by Galton's Sociological 
Papers and The Eugenics Review has proven to be a line of 
approach of great practical interest to the English aristocracy 
and to science. In this country societies to further sex purity 
and to teach the young have been formed in the last three or 
four years in New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Chicago, 
Milwaukee, Indiana, St. Louis, Denver, Portland, Spokane, 
California, West Virginia, Florida, some of them, be it ob- 
served State societies. Others are being organized as I write 
(April, 1910) in Georgia, Connecticut, Texas and New Jer- 
sey. These societies are generally composed of doctors and 
laymen and they seek to arouse the public to a sense of the 
present dangers by pamphlets and discussions. (The Chicago 
society under C. R. Henderson has issued nearly half a million 
pamphlets. See, too, the national year book for 1908 of the 
American Society for Scientific Study of Education devoted to 
this subject.) The New York Society has associated itself with 
the teachers of biology with a request to the authorities to pro- 
vide sex instruction for all first-year high-school pupils. The 
Spokane society (which has also distributed nearly half a mil- 
lion circulars) addresses one about their birth to children from 
6 to 10; another to boys from 10 to 13; another for those 
about 13 or 14; one for girls of 14, etc. The Maryland so- 
ciety employs two paid agents : a man giving half his time and 
a woman giving all hers. " The children from 10 to 12 years 
or thereabout are taken in small groups and given very ob- 
jective instruction. They have in their room flowers, cocoons, 
frogs, birds, mice, rabbits, etc., so that every step in each talk 
has definite tangible bearing in their minds." Various similar 
attempts are being made at various points with children in the 

1 Eugene Prevost: Le Congres International contre la Pornographie, L'Enfant, 
1908, vol. 18, pp. 258-261. See also the bulletins of the Soc. Franfaise de Prophy- 
laxie Sanitaire et Morale, since 1900. 



412 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

two upper grammar and in the high-school grades. From 
these and many other centers active campaigns of education 
are being waged against vice. The new movement here is at 
present perhaps rather too much dominated by the medical 
standpoint and is perhaps disproportionately conscious of the 
dangers of disease. We must, therefore, first strive to evalu- 
ate this factor for pedagogy. 

The Use of the Disease Factor in Sex Pedagogy. — To 
estimate this aright we must glance backward. In classical 
antiquity, especially in Greece, there was a frankness and 
openness concerning sex life which our day has lost. 
How far the free Arcadian conditions, originating perhaps 
with primitive people and not only unrestrained, but aggra- 
vated by the ancient civilizations as their wealth and luxury 
increased, became a factor in undermining the empires of old, 
we do not know. We do know, however, that prudery, self- 
consciousness and secretiveness in these matters have increased 
Jn recent centuries. Sexual diseases have a cultural which 
is no whit less significant than their medical history. Syphi- 
lis, which has had much, perhaps more than we know, to do 
with the great pestilences, seems to have appeared in Europe 
in the fifteenth century, and Ivan Bloch ^ thinks its story will 
be complete in five acts. Some thought it due to sodomy. 
Its first recorded outbreak is during the Italian campaign of 
Charles the VIII, of France, in 1494. His army of 32,000 
contained soldiers from many nations and spent four weeks at 
Rome where, we are told, there were 14,000 Spanish prosti- 
tutes. Wherever this army went the disease spread like an 
explosion with great virulence. All historians say it was un- 
known. Although some pestilences had been more fatal, " not 
even the black death made such a fearful impression or left 
such terror in the souls of posterity." Its malignity can only 
be explained by assuming that Europe had been free from it 
before. All the old chroniclers insist that previous medical 
reports from Hippocrates to Galen knew nothing of it, so 
there were no remedies and the deaths were countless. It 
affected all classes, even the clergy, and society was appalled 



' Der Ursprung der Syphilis. Fischer, Jena, 1901, vol. i, 313 p. Also Das erste 
Auftreten der Syphilis in der europaischen Kulturwelt. Fischer, Jena, 1904, 35 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 413 

to see the social vice suddenly stand out in such a glaring light. 
Many believe it was imported from Hayti or Hispaniola by 
the sailors of Columbus. At any rate, Indians there, where 
it was less fatal, had elaborate modes of treating it, by hydro- 
therapeutic devices and sweat houses. This very skill would 
indicate that the disease was old among them. In ancient 
Mexico there were experts with hospitals, public and private, 
specially devoted to this disease. By the year 1500 nearly all 
European lands had suffered and in the early part of the next 
century the disease spread to Asia, China, and Japan, although 
Africa until lately has shown only the slightest signs of infec- 
tion. The virus always works most rapidly on virgin soil 
where there is almost no immunity. The moral condition of 
the period just preceding in Europe was by general consent 
very low and profligacy was open. This disease was given 
not less than 536 different names in European lands, until in 
1520 an Italian doctor named it from the mythic shepherd 
Syphilis. This was the first fatal gift from the New to the 
Old World and is in a way connected with the Renaissance 
and the Reformation. It impressed the world somewhat as 
leprosy did the Middle Ages. Krafft-Ebing believes that 
there are deep inner connections yet to be known between this 
disease and the type of civilization that has since followed. 
Its influence certainly has profoundly affected the relation of 
the sexes and greatly modified love and given it a very distinct 
type from that which it had in ancient Arcadian days and in 
the Middle Ages. Schopenhauer says that the modern period 
as compared with this is stern, gloomy, and sinister ; while the 
antique world was as happy, careless and free as childhood. 
The two principles that separate them, he thinks, are the 
knightly one of honor and venereal disease, a noble pair of 
brothers ! The latter had its moral as well as physical effects. 
Since then love's arrows have been poisoned and elements of 
hostility have been insinuated into the relations between the 
sexes, and the diabolical element involving distrust has affected 
the very best of society. Had this disease existed, there surely 
never could have been such extreme immorality in ancient 
days, for there were no sex ghosts that haunted the world then. 
This disease contributed most to bring the great horror of 
women devoted to pleasure, as mediators of disease that bears 



414 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the mark of Cain. This destroyed the mediaeval Frauen- 
hduser. It compelled caution in public baths, brought fears 
and perhaps phobias of contact, encouraged certain types of 
separation of the sexes with some distrust, magnified individ- 
uality and perhaps favored spiritual and physical freedom be- 
cause they were associated with isolation. Indeed, the develop- 
ment of individuality in the Renaissance, as opposed to the 
mediaeval communal spirit, may have owed something to the 
horror which this disease excited. Some have connected the 
decline of culture at the end of the sixteenth century with the 
advent of this disease, which brought some subtle psychic al- 
teration into the consciousness of Europe, which is possible 
when we consider its greater severity and its connection with 
tabes and progressive paralysis. It has something to do, too, 
with individual degeneration because its hereditary forms gnaw 
more fatally at the vitals of society than its acquired types, and 
its results are seen in still-births, divorces, infections from 
nurses, sterility, etc. Its infections are all the more dangerous 
because they are often innocent. The last act in the drama is 
the weakening of the virus and the gradually progressive 
immunity, which is slowly advancing. Occasionally, already 
children of syphilitic mothers are immune. Perhaps the strong 
mercurialization of the previous generations has something to 
do with it, for quicksilver acts on it like water on fire. But for 
extra-marital relations, syphilis would vanish in a few genera- 
tions. There is great danger and increase in colonies, espe- 
cially negroid and Mongolian females impart a most malign 
form of the disease, so that cross racial types greatly intensify 
it, as is seen in Anglo-Saxons in the East. Possibly by the 
end of five centuries from its origin, its European existence 
may approach an end. Virchow, at any rate, has assured us 
that this disease and men are not inseparable. It is infectious 
only and has no known spontaneous origin. 

When Fournier's " Syphilis and Marriage " was translated 
in 1880 and became a-classic, almost nothing was known of 
gonorrhea, the germ of which was discovered by Neisser in 
1879 and has played a role of great and interesting importance. 
Syphilis strikes chiefly at the child, but the gonococcus at the 
reproductive function of woman, besides having grave col- 
lateral effects of many kinds. The wreckage of these chief 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 415 

venereal diseases is caused mostly not by debauchees, but by 
men who pass as respectable. The latter disease is far more 
universal and venereal morbidity is higher in cities than in the 
country but gonorrhea is a greater depopulator. A recent 
German expert holds it responsible for more than 45 per cent 
of the sterile marriages, directly causing metritis and bringing 
social misery in its train. Voluntary childlessness is bad 
enough; but barrenness that is enforced against the dearest 
wish of a woman's heart by " a shame that cannot be named 
for shame " is far worse. 

The Cultus Minister requested all regular Prussian phy- 
sicians to tell him how many persons had consulted them for 
their own sexual diseases on a certain day, choosing April 30, 
1900. The answers show that on that day 41,000 patients 
had sought relief, although as the report was voluntary, only 
about two thirds of the physicians reported, so that at this 
rate, had they all done so, the number would have been some 
60,000. Even this number is, of course, too small, since 
quacks, curists and druggists whom so many consult were not 
asked to report, and many of those afflicted refrain from con- 
sultation. It is, of course, impossible from such data to 
assume what proportion of the community was afflicted, even 
if this was an average day, but it, of course, indicates that the 
number is very large. Another notable fact brought out by 
the report was that the proportion of victims of these diseases 
was much greater in large than in small cities, Berlin alone 
furnishing a little over one fourth of all, the percentage of the 
population seeking medical aid increasing somewhat in propor- 
tion to the size of the town. A later very careful census of 
Mannheim with a population of 150,000 showed 4,200 diseased 
men, the great majority of whom were fresh cases. 

According to Birdseye/ conditions are very bad in Amer- 
ican colleges. After gathering in his first data, he was so 
appalled at the results that he feared he should be thought to 
be an alarmist and his conclusions challenged, they were so 
opposite to the testimony of college authorities, so he printed 

^ See the data which C. F. Birdseye has collected from thirty American colleges 
concerning the prevalence of sexual vice and disease and drunkenness. In The 
Reorganization of our Colleges. Baker & Taylor, N. Y., 1909, 410 p. See pp. 
I 18-145. 



4i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thirty booklets and distributed them widely, sought confirma- 
tory evidence in addition to his own conversations and cor- 
respondence with " hundreds of college professors and officials, 
students, deans, medical men, and recent graduates." He 
assures us that he does not use the worst reports of the evil 
" which is at the very bottom of our college waste heaps " ; and 
finds that parents, alumni, preparatory school-teachers, and 
college authorities are sunk in a " fatal torpor in regard to 
these things." " In many of our larger colleges and univer- 
sities, and in too many of our smaller ones, a very considerable 
part of the college home life is morally rotten — terribly so. 
Some of the smaller and older colleges, with grand records in 
the past, have as low a standard in student morals as the larger 
universities. Some of the worst conditions prevail in minor 
denominational institutions which are presumed to be ultra-re- 
ligious and to be the chief places for furnishing clergymen for 
such denominations." " In some institutions from twenty per 
cent to forty per cent of the graduate and undergraduate 
students consort with lewd women, and at least as large a 
ratio drink to excess at times. The proportions are much 
higher in the upper classes than in the lower, showing that 
these vices are largely the direct result of influences which 
prevail in the college community life and the college home. 
In some instances at least twenty per cent of the students 
have been venereally diseased before their course is finished.'i-^ 
" These appalling figures are based on the carefully sifted 
estimates of the students themselves in many widely separated 
institutions, checked off by men whose professional or other 
college connections have brought them into close personal 
touch with the college home life. The testimony of a member 
of the faculty as such may be, and sometimes has been found 
to be, practically worthless in regard to these matters, for they 
are entirely outside of his pedagogy and therefore outside of 
his department." " Except in large cities these evils are much 
more likely to be perpetrated in a neighboring factory center 
than in the college town." " Another terrible aspect of the 
social evil in college is that the women are frequently of a low 
class, who also consort freely with mill hands, miners and 
rounders of the worst type, and are almost of necessity 
diseased." " Our college students are not financially able to 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 4^7 

indulge in expensive luxuries of this kind." Our college 
authorities have " failed to properly study or combat these 
evils, but they have too often emphatically and unceasingly 
denied their existence, when a little examination would have 
shown them that they were wrong. One professor in a college 
situated in a community which morally is notoriously one of 
the worst in the country, was quite indignant at my suggestion 
that in his institution any considerable proportion of the 
undergraduates were diseased. But after a frank discussion 
of facts and local conditions, he admitted that the average 
might be as high as thirty per cent. Again and again this 
fatal blindness, and even unwillingness to see, of our college 
authorities is encountered by those who investigate the college 
home life." " The percentage is much larger in the graduate 
schools than in the academic courses; . . . and it is not too 
much to assume that in some cases at least twenty-five per 
cent of those who complete the professional school courses 
have at some time been diseased." Lately the press con- 
demned a Catholic priest for warning the young women in his 
parish not to associate with college students. " Those who 
are acquainted with the student conditions in that institution 
know that these priests would be justified in almost any meas- 
ures which they might take to protect their young women 
parishioners. A reputable physician has recently stated that 
of his own knowledge all the undergraduate members of a 
certain fraternity chapter (his own), were diseased, with the 
exception of three freshmen who had just been initiated, and 
that almost all the recent graduates had suffered in the same 
manner." " In the college homes of some institutions separate 
towels and other supplies are kept for those who are actively 
diseased ; just as in many such homes there are special rooms 
and accommodations, * boozatoriums,' for those who are 
brought home drunk. In too many college homes there is a 
fearful obscenity and filthiness of language." " College and 
fraternity banquets frequently end in drunken orgies." " The 
colleges are too often blind leaders of the blind with low 
ideals." But I forbear, hoping that despite his careful and 
conscientious precautions of method, Mr. Birdseye may have 
been misled into magnifying the evil. No one familiar with 
academic life can deny that there is at the very least now a 
28 



4i8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

prima facie case for further investigation; and if these evils 
exist, moral reorganizations as drastic as the financial ones 
this author proposes are necessary. I firml y belie ve that this 
author exaggerates a real evil. 

Dr. P. A. Morrow ^ avers that " there is no class of disease in 
any department of medicine which in the past has been so neglected 
and mismanaged. Many physicians still look upon gonorrhea as a 
trivial affliction and their entire armamentarium consists of a glass 
syringe and half a dozen or more formulcC for injection. To them 
syphiHs is simply a sequence of primaries, secondaries, and tertiaries 
and the whole therapeutic problem resolves itself into so many months 
of mercury followed by so many months of iodide of potassium." This 
mere modicum of often mistaken knowledge is to be traced to the 
low standards set by our medical schools and to the subordinate posi- 
tion always occupied by venereology. Fifteen years ago the cata- 
logues of seventy-five leading medical institutions showed that in half 
of them there was no special provision made for such instruction, 
and in all these studies were elective and not essential. Since then 
things have improved, but there is great absence of proper clinical 
facilities. " The diagnosis of syphilis furnishes a ready refuge for 
ignorance so that patients are carelessly and often wrongly con- 
demned to a long course of specific treatment, and many physicians 
lightly sanction marriage." " Taking only lesions which may involve 
or compromise the integrity of important organs, we may place to 
the debit side of syphilis 90 per cent of all cases of locomotor ataxia; 
more than 75 per cent of all ocular paralysis; a considerable per- 
centage of cases of iritis, choroiditis, retinitis; a large but undeter- 
mined proportion of general paralysis, periplegia and hemiplegia; 
80 per cent of all cases of paresis have a history of syphilis; every 
hemiplegia occurring in men under forty years of age not addicted 
to alcohol is of syphilitic origin. This does not include its morbid 
determinations to the heart, kidney, and other organs." " The bill 
of its hereditary morbidity and mortality is much larger. Syphilis 
causes 42 per cent of all abortions; 60 to 80 per cent of syphilitic 
children die in utero or shortly after birth; those who survive are the 
subjects of dystrophies and degenerative changes, physical and men- 
tal, which make of them inferior beings unfit for the combat of life." 

" The pathological liabilities of gonococcus infection are scarcely 
less formidable. The undeniable and scientifically demonstrated 
danger of this infection in women is that it causes 80 per cent of all 
deaths from inflammatory diseases peculiar to women, practically 
all the pus tubes, more than 75 per cent of the suppurative pelvic 
inflammations, and 50 per cent of all gynecological operations." 

* Education within the Medical Profession. Medical News, 1905, vol. 86, pp. 
1153-1156. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 4^9 

" From 20 to 30 per cenf of gonorrheally infected women abort, and 
from 45 to 50 per cent are rendered irrevocably sterile." About 80 
per cent of the blindness of the newborn and 20 per cent of it from 
all causes is due to this infection, and yet these things do not form 
an integral or essential part of medical education. The public is 
still responsible for its ridiculous prudery and for the traditional 
prejudice that surrounds all these matters with an atmosphere of 
shame. How can the teaching of young men to lead lives according 
to nature and health be profane? Even the profession itself is 
tainted with this atavism. Even sanitary officials entirely ignore the 
existence of these diseases. When syphilis arose in Europe in the 
fifteenth century, it was given a baptism of shame, the stigma 
of which still clings, and this " in the face of the fact that there is 
in the aggregate more venereal infection to-day among virtuous 
wives than among professional prostitutes." To the former, no 
odium usually ought to be attached, but we should feel for them only 
pity. The medical profession should rise above this insensate preju- 
dice. While these diseases are always a misfortune, they are not 
always a merited punishment. Reform should commence in the 
ranks of the medical profession and especially in the professional 
education. It is, however, consoling to be assured that what Dr. L. 
D. Bulkley called " the great black plague " does seem to be checked 
in some quarters, for according to statistics collected by Schwien- 
ing ^ it appears that from 1870 to 1880 the chief venereal diseases 
in the European armies have shown marked decline in France, Ger- 
many, England, Belgium and Holland, and a slight, though less, 
decline in Austria and Italy, and perhaps none in Russia, although 
statistics there have been kept only since 1885. 

R. C. Henderson gives the following statistics : " In the Prussian- 
German army during the years 1873-93 the average annual sickness 
from these causes was 32.2 per cent of the active soldiery; in the 
French army of 1883-93, 43-6 to 58.9 per cent; in the army of Austria- 
Hungary in the period 1869-93, 53 to 81.4 per cent; in the Italian 
1883-93, 79 to 104 per cent. In the German navy there were sick 
in the years 1875-76 to 1888-89 on the average 127.9 V^^ cent. In 
the English army it was worse, and in the Dutch army the ratio 
rising to 224.5 ^^d 294.1 per cent. If we take all the European 
armies together we may say that each day 70,000 to 80,000 soldiers 
are treated for venereal diseases and more or less unfitted for duty. 
... In the civil population it is bad enough. Only a part of those 
affected enter hospitals, yet the figures for these are startling enough. 
In Prussian hospitals in 1887-99 about 240,000 persons or 58 per cent 
of all patients were treated for venereal disorders. In more northern 
lands, because greater care is taken, the larger ratio obtains. . . ." 

* Beitrage zur Kenntnis der Verbreitung der venerischen Krankheiten in den 
europaischen Heeren, sowie in der militarpflichtigen Jugend Deutschlands. Hirsch- 
wald, Berlin, 1907, 99 p. 



420 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

The Committee of Fifteen report that in New York " a consider- 
able proportion of the syphilitics treated in the hospitals are boys in 
their teens. Probably the majority of sufferers from syphilis are 
infected before their twenty-sixth year. Of 10,000 syphilitics who 
came under the observation of Professor Fournier, 817 were infected 
before their twentieth year, 1,530 between twenty-one and twenty- 
six." " Of 3,122 children brought before the Juvenile Court in 1908, 
one per cent of the boys and 20 per cent of the girls were suffering 
from venereal infection," writes Clara Schmidt. 

Morrow estimates that one eighth of all human disease and suf- 
fering comes from this source. These diseases fall most heavily 
upon the young. Every year in this country 770,000 males reach the 
age of early maturity or approach the danger zone of sex. Judging 
the future from the past some 60 per cent or over 450,000 of these 
men will sometime during their lives become infected: 20 per cent 
of them before the twenty-first year, 50 per cent before the twenty- 
fifth, and 80 per cent before the thirtieth year. These 450,000 infec- 
tions, be it understood, represent the venereal morbidity incident to 
the male product of a single year, each succeeding year furnishing 
its quota of victims. So of women, about 80 per cent of the deaths 
from inflammatory diseases peculiar to their sex, 75 per cent of 
special surgical operations, and 60 per cent of all the work done by 
specialists in diseases of women are the result of specific infection. 
At least 50 per cent of these infected women are rendered absolutely 
sterile. Every year thousands of poor young wives are thus infected 
and their aspirations to be parents are swept away. Dr. Louis T. 
Wilson ^ thinks this is on the increase in this country rather than 
on the decrease. Is it not time, therefore, as Professor Henderson 
says, " for all those who value our national health and morality to 
unite in a reasonable, earnest and patient campaign for sexual purity ? 
For apathy and neglect there is no longer excuse." 

Dr. W. T. Murrell ^ states that with emancipation, the stalwart 
negro race became a victim of the sex impulse and there was a 
carnival of indulgence and a maximum increase of births between 
1860-80; but many of the children born then were degenerates as 
compared to their forebears, and their progeny are very rapidly de- 
clining. This writer affirms the general early defloration of girls in 
startling terms, based upon a collection of medical opinions. Worst 
of all is the increase of disease. " It is my honest belief that another 
fifty years will find an unsyphilitic negro a freak." The negro is 
never afraid of this or other diseases because he assumes that the 
doctors have a cure for every trouble. Sexual errors are never 
regarded as serious. It is largely this disease, connected as it is 

' A Few Remarks on the Prevalence of Venereal Disease. Amer. Jour, of Pub- 
lic Hygiene, Feb., 1908, vol. 18, No. i, pp. 39-45. 

^ Syphilis and the American Negro. Jour, of the Amer. Med. Assoc, March 12, 
19 10, vol. 54, No. II, pp. 846-849. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 42I 

with the abandonment to passion, that has made the negro to-day a 
far inferior type to the one of two generations ago. " His mind 
and body are traveling different ways." He is no longer a fixed 
type, and in fifty years is likely to change even more than he has in 
the last. 

We can now squarely put the first question in this field. 
It is inevitable and parents and teachers with a just sense of 
their responsibility must now answer it in one way or another. 
It is this : If the above is true, shall your children be clearly 
informed of it, or will you let them take their chance in igno- 
rance, for the results of which they may later hold you to grim 
account ? With one tenth the danger of any other infection — 
diphtheria, scarlatina, etc. — you would do all in your power to 
lessen the chances of contagion ; so why be silent here ? But, 
on the other hand, w^e must not forget that there is some 
justification for the instinctive reticence of elders. Nothing 
seems more opposed to the very nature of childhood or better 
calculated to dry up the springs of love in the soul at their very 
source. These grim facts, it would seem, must drive juveniles 
out of their paradise, if not tend to make them old and pessi- 
mistic before their time and suspicious of all their friends of 
the other sex. Does the peril justify thus blighting the joys 
of young life? Will not such inculcations add to the repres- 
sions which psychopathology shows us are already far too 
great in this field for some, and cause most of the neuroses 
and many of the psychoses of later life? Any physician can 
see the physical dangers, but only those with moral and 
psychological insight can do justice to these subtle dangers. 
This is an objection which must be weighed with care and, of 
course, must be determined on with reference to each individ-^ 
ual case. Young, nervous and delicate girls sheltered in good 
homes have very different needs here from hardier ones early 
thrown out upon the rude world alone ; and neither must be_ 
the norm for the other. Physicians who think their chief 
duty complete when they have imparted the facts and figures 
of sex pathology are no more fit to cope with the situation 
than parents who live in the fool's paradise of fancying their 
own children are in no danger or have yielded to the natural 
reluctance to impart this repelling information to their 
pubescent boys and girls. All data like the above and more 



422 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

should be in the doctor's pharmacopoeia, but handing it out to 
all alike would work great harm. Some need to know yet 
more, and a few lives would be happier and richer in innocent 
ignorance, were this possible. Most children, however, I am 
convinced need to know the general facts about these diseases 
as about others that they may catch. Those with perverse 
inclinations need them brought out luridly enough to provoke 
sufficient fear to organize the maximum of deterrence possible 
in their souls. The case must be " put up to " certain young 
boys strong and hard, in the most concise and cogent language 
I that the gang vocabulary can supply. Fear has had a great 
j deal to do in the evolution of man, and it is our bounden duty 
to utilize it here for all it is worth. As adults grow to matur- 
ity they generally lose the power to adapt to any wide diversity 
of personalities, or even to recognize them, and perhaps no. one 
who could do the best thing for a tough' boy here could also 
do the best by a delicate one, or vice versa, to say nothing of 
girls. He would tend to gravitate toward an average mass 
method that would injure both. Our returns show that the 
very street gamin knows in his coarse way the chief facts 
about these two diseases; and those who have become pr^e- 
cociously immoral are often led by their knowledge to get 
possession of and actually use preventives " so as not to get 
stung." Even this may be a harldicap on promiscuity. 
Teleological writers, however, justify these diseases as specters 
designed to frighten young people into chastity until ado- 
lescence is complete. More regard them as efficient agents 
in eliminating the unfit; and if they could be safeguarded, 
would let them kill the infected individuals and families. A 
few regard them as intensive stimuli of individuation in those 
whose genesic power has become poisoned. In sexual selec- 
tion, too, we are told, love favors come with dangers, and in 
man's artificial environment these new dangers of disease sup- 
ply the place of that which once jealous rivals provided. 
Others think the worst result of these diseases is that they 
deter the best and most prudent from the hazards of matri- 
mony. But all these are merely guesses. One thing only is 
certain, viz., that not only every normal boy, but also every 
girl in the early teens craves and needs to know the facts, each 
to be sure in his own way : for boys, bare and bold and with 



, THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 423 

every detail, while girls want the same facts, but more veiled, j 
indirect, taught with a little more sentiment and with adjust- / 
ment to temperament. Both are stronger and better for this' 
knowledge and more able to face life with courage and resolu- 
tion. This mental preparation should come just in time to\^ 
curb the first uprush of passion, to which our forebears applie^..^-'^^ 
hell fire, of which these diseases- are our modern version and sur- 
rogate with the great pedagogic gain that now the devil fore- 
closes his claim far more promptly, and there is no Redeemer 
to rob him of his just prey. The very concept of Jesus bearing 
all our diseases and infirmities in this sense is repulsive. 

The ancient oath of Hippocrates which physicians had to 
take w^s : " My tongue shall be silent as to the secrets which 
are confided to me, and I will not use my profession to corrupt 
manners or aid crimes." To-day the medical and often penal 
codes enforce professional secrecy and perhaps exempt the 
doctors from disclosing, even in. criminal trials, information 
acquired in the exercise of their profession. These diseases 
put up to the doctor a new and serious problem, for all hygienic 
laws require physicians to report diseases that are dangerous 
to the public health. Venereal diseases are so, but are usually 
exempted from declaration save in Norway and Denmark. 
Sanitary bureaus certainly ought to register these diseases. 
The French law punishes a physician who allows the nurse of 
a syphilitic child to suffer. If the father of a girl about to 
marry asks his own physician whether the prospective bride- 
groom, also his patient, is fit to marry, what should the phy- 
sician do? Under present conditions he would certainly be 
put on his mettle. He might refuse to answer, or advise 
against the marriage, giving no reason, or appeal to the young 
man's honor to confess. Occasionally, scoundrels rely on the 
doctor's present custom and code or reticence. Should the 
doctor stop short with simply advice against a marriage which 
he knows will' result in infection? Some doctors urge such 
young men to insure their lives, knowing that they will not be 
willing to face an examination. In Spain, a physician's certifi- 
cate must accompany every demand for a marriage license.^ 

^ Why should a woman's friends warn her against marrying a drunkard and not 
against one infected with this disease? Dr. Grandin says that the nubile girl of 
the future will demand a certificate of health; that women physicians will be at- 



424 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

In France, Fortin demands a law authorizing the physician to 
*' no longer respect the professional secret when it comes to a 
project of marriage." Here, however, we are trenching upon 
eugenics. 

Place of Eugenics in Pedagogy. — Luther Burbank, by 
his magic evolution of valuable out of worthless wild plant 
stocks ; Nietzsche, by his effort to apply Darwinism to man by 
condemning pity, and even Christianity, because it helps the 
weak and sickly to survive when they ought to perish in the 
interests of posterity, and by insisting that a higher superman 
can and must be evolved ; Galton, with his contagious idealism 
and also his many practical devices for suppressing the bad 
and increasing the best family stirps — all these and many more 
have now called the attention of the world to the subject of 
human heredity in a new practical way, and revived the old 
dreams of a Utopian and Platonic or a kind of future biolog- 
ical millennium. As opposed to this, modern philanthropy not 
only keeps alive, but tenderly nurses the weeds in the human 
garden. After years of diligent crossing, when at length a 
very few specimens of fruit stand on a tree far superior to all 
others that have been achieved, Mr. Burbank kindles a great 
fire, consuming thousands of specimens that were incapable of 
producing higher types. We cannot pull up or burn the 
human weeds, and hence it is very doubtful, despite our 
marvelous progress in arts, sciences, wealth, and comfort, 
whether mankind in all civilized lands is not actually declining 
in quality as biological specimens, as we know it is beginning 
to do in rate of increase and in many places actually in num- 
bers. The Malthusian specter of the globe in the future, 
crowded far beyond the means of sustenance, seems thus 
effectively laid; and if it were ever realized, it would only be 
by the spawn of degenerate families like the Jukes, Ishmaels, 

tached to every factory and store where girls are employed; and he insists that pro- 
fessional secrets should no longer aid in the spread of vice. 

Dr. E. L. Keyes combats the widespread notion that gonorrhea is no worse than 
a cold and that a mild gleet is not contagious, and above all the abominable view 
widely shared that intercourse or marriage is a wholesome treatment for its milder 
forms. His appeal for prophylaxis (The Need of Sexual Education. Med. News, 
1905, vol. 86, pp. 1165-1167) is based on statistics, which he thinks show one in 
ten in New York and in Berlin one in four unmarried females are syphilitic, and 
holds that the first step is usually drink. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 425 

Karnagels, and other low-grade stocks. A few generations 
ago, a large family was very desirable, especially in the coun- 
try, and it meant increased income. Even a widow with a 
large family was a good marriageable proposition. Under 
present economic conditions, however, large families often 
seem unwise, and the strong, natural, wholesome desire for 
offspring essential for the prosperity of any race or nation is 
brought into direct opposition to the passion for advancement 
in social condition. On the other hand, F. Galton says : " Few 
things are more needed by us in England than a revision of 
our religion to adapt it to the intelligence and need of the 
present time." ^ He meets the criticism that human nature 
will not tolerate any interference with freedom in marriage by 
saying that monogamy has been established as against promis- 
cuity and polygamy, both by law and by social sentiment. So 
has endogamy, as if even primitive races felt human traits 
more valuable than money or land. So prohibited degrees, 
and even celibacy have changed pretty settled ideas and cus- 
toms of sex. Indeed, religion has always been the most 
potent of all factors in matters pertaining to the transmission 
of life and demands now honest morals in unambiguous 
language. Marriage has always been a very elastic institu- 
tion. H. G. Wells has contributed to popularize these ideas in 
England, and an anonymous writer has proposed a voluntary 
nobility,^ which shall lead the simple higher life, to which 
all are invited who have good intent, who imagine their own 
best and strive to attain it, who love the slogan of justice, sin- 
cerity, truth, control, friendship, honor, no matter what their 
creed, provided only they are not militarists. It is assumed 
that after young men have had a taste of wine, love and song, 
and have " felt the full bite of able-bodied desire," and at the 
age of twenty-three or twenty-five, when the ebullitions of the 
earliest youth are controlled, they may like to enlist in this 
knighthood ; that the elements of a Utopia, which are hidden, 
dispersed and disorganized in the world, unsuspected even by 
those who cherish them, might thus be brought together. In 
this Samurai college there must be no idleness, but no drudgery. 



* Restrictions in Marriage. Sociological Papers, 1905, vol. 2, pp. 1-13. 
^Proposal for a Voluntary Nobility. Samurai Press, 1907, 31 p. 



426 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

There must be seven days every week spent from sunrise to 
sunset in the open air alone, fasting and in silence. In a sense, 
everything here is a discipline for ideal parenthood. We need 
not jest or take too seriously the proposition of H. G. Wells ^ 
for a state gratuity to each wife bearing a child, to be in- 
creased if the child proves superior. This would make mother- 
hood a paying profession, and the career of one who had a num- 
ber of healthy children would be prosperous financially, so that 
she would be a great advantage to her husband. " Prolific 
marriage would be made a profitable privilege." This Utopia 
should issue certificates of fitness for matrimony to such per- 
sons of both sexes as wished it on the basis of examination; 
and there should be measures taken against deceptions on 
either hand. While none need enter, such a scheme would 
attract the best and not the worst. This is not inconsistent 
with A. Lang and J. J. Atkinson,^ who think that the control 
of mating was the origin of the state, the chief function of 
which should still be to protect the interests of posterity. The 
tribe and other ethnic associations have usually been marriage 
groups which tended to widen, and in an ultimate system there 
will perhaps have to be a place for about every marriage type 
that has worked well anywhere from henid theories up to the 
Catholic and Comptean view of the indissolubility of this tie. 
Of course such a eugenic synthesis is far away and its only use 
at present can be to soften the rigidity and startle the unin- 
telligence in this field. 

M. Gruber ^ declares that there is no doubt that if we prac- 
ticed natural selection, bringing to bear upon it all the knowl- 
edge that we have, as breeders of cattle, do, within a few gener- 
ations a race of men would be developed that would far exceed 
in beauty, physical power, and ability, any the world has yet 
seen. We might also, he thinks, produce a race of monsters 
by violating all these precepts. He admits, however, that men 
will never, in these modern days of freedom, submit to such 
restraints as that to which domestic animals are subjected in 
the way of procreation. Moreover, there are no experts that 
could guide in all the details of practical solutions. To pro- 

^ A Modern Utopia. Scribner, N. Y., 1907, 393 p. 

^Social Origins: with Primal Law. Longmans, N. Y., 1903, 312 p. 

3 Hygiene des Geschlechtslebens. Moritz, Stuttgart, 1907, 93 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 427 

create children thoughtlessly is, however, a grave violation of 
duty, and to do so knowing that they will be defective is about 
the worst sin man can commit. We can, however, apply the 
constraints of law to prevent the multiplication of defectives. 
To make the best do their best we must rely upon individual, 
race and social hygiene. Public opinion must be developed to 
the point where we should realize that for the fit not to rear / 
children is a sin against the community and the future and that"^ 
to do so is the first end and purpose of marriage. Indeed, he^ 
would have the entire sex element of our nature regulated 
solely with this end in view and would increase the legislation 
which limits, if not exterminates, the unfit. It is generally 
agreed that the simplest and most effective prophylaxis against 
consumption is the abstinence from wedlock of all who are in 
any degree affected. He believes that about all the funda- 
mental principles of biology have application to sociology. J. 
Rutgers ^ insists at great length and with some learning that 
" only children wished for by both parents must be born," and 
insists that the proper use of preventives is " the physiolog- 
ical optimum, a godsend to long-suffering and heavy-laden 
mothers and may be the salvation of the race." Dr. Mott 
would have the state encourage registry offices authorized to 
issue bills of health that would have not only moral but com- 
mercial value to the possessors and their children, would be 
of use in life insurance, in obtaining employment, and 
in obtaining pensions. Savages require certain achieve- 
ments or ordeals of suffering for candidates for marriage. 
Why should not the hemigamy of the future be upheld by a 
force equal to the old sexual taboos with their religious sanc- 
tion? Some would have concealment of grave hereditary 
diseases a crime so serious as to annul a marriage contract, 
despite the belief of some that a very slight taint may benefit 
rather than injure a good stock. Nordau thinks our vaunted 
thoroughbred animals, e. g., the horse, are adapted for only 
one purpose at the expense of their general vitality and that 
it would be hard for stirpiculture to select the really best quali- 
ties to breed for in the human race. He cites in support of this, 
many men of great and special talents but of ugliness and in- 

^ Rassenverbesserung. Minden, Dresden, 1908, 303 p. 



428 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

feriority otherwise. Posada thinks a great general good would 
be attained when women would refuse an impure man with the 
same repugnance that he would feel toward an impure woman. 
Perhaps we need patriarchal families. Weismann before com- 
mitting himself to eugenics wishes further information as to 
whether tuberculosis can be banished from a family. Tonnies 
and C. A. Witchell ^ are uncertain about purposive breeding be- 
cause it is not certain what should be aimed at. Should a good 
man choose for the mother of his children the greatest physical 
attractions, or a spiritual elevation that makes him forget 
them? Selection works by some principle too subtle for 
science as yet, for slight inclination, many agree, can be gener- 
ally influenced by hygienic considerations; and it is at this 
reserved stage rather than when love has supervened that 
appeal can be effective. Probably if all the lower half of the 
race were to marry, their progeny would be superior to them- 
selves rather than inferior; and if the best mated, their prog- 
eny would, on the whole, be inferior rather than superior. 
Eugenics, with its honor certificates, may perhaps be regarded 
as the culmination of all that we call evolution, because phi- 
lanthropy is thus extended to future generations. Senti- 
mental charity would be eliminated and a new religion inaug- 
urated. J. F. Bobbitt ^ points out how the many aristocracies 
of our day are constantly training some for one, some for 
another, kind of high ability. 

The number of children born of native American parents 
is now less than in any country of the world. In New Eng- 
land where the situation seems worst the death rate of whites 
numbers much more than the birth rate, while in the same 
region the birth rate of those of foreign parentage is forty- 
five per thousand greater than the death rate. The advent of 
five million women in the industrial wage-earning field is one 
factor, while Rene Bache ^ estimates that voluntary sterility 
costs us half a million babies in ten years. Among the better 
classes child rearing is very expensive ; the fee of doctors, who 
to justify their charges often exaggerate the dangers of child- 

^ The Cultivation of Man According to the Teachings of Common Sense. 
London, 1904, 168 p. 

^ Practical Eugenics. Ped. Sem., Sept., 1909, vol. 16, pp. 385-394. 

3 America's Race Suicide. Pearson's Magazine, 1906, vol. 15, pp. 410-416. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 429 

birth until women are afraid, is from one hundred dollars to 
one thousand dollars. According to Bertillon's law the birth 
rate is inversely as economic prosperity and he finds that 
among the poor it is three times what it is among the rich. 
Again, free religious agnostics are said to have the fewest 
children, then come Protestants who are exceeded by Cath- 
olics, while the Hebrews outrank all. A German woman, 
drunkard and thief, had 834 descendants, most of whom were 
worthless and in seventy-five years cost the German govern- 
ment $1,250,000. There are now about two and one half 
million more bachelors of twenty and beyond than unmarried 
young women in this country. Newsholme and Stevenson,^ 
Taylor,^ Yule,^ show that the fall of the birth rate of the upper 
class of London is just about twice that in the lower class, 
that it was greatest from 1891 to 1901 and there was no rela- 
tion between this and the cost of living, that the decline 
extends to illegitimate births and is everywhere due to artifi- 
cial prevention which threatens the welfare of nations. W. A. 
Chappie,^ too, thinks that natural fertility is undiminished, 
that women dread maternity and crave ease, for a large family 
makes a woman a slave. The laws that forbid children from 
eight to fourteen to work prevent them from compensating 
the expense for rearing them. But for artificial prevention 
marriage rates would decline still more. A barren life and a 
loveless old age is a fit punishment for olegantropy. Our view 
is just the reverse of Stuart Mill who thought large families 
should be looked upon as is drunkenness. 

Many ancient and primitive people expose the child, 
especially the weak and defenseless, to eliminate the unfit. 
Just so now, H. M. Boies would limit the fecundity of degen- 
erates and McKim would kill the worst criminals painlessly and 
tenderly. Weinhold would castrate annually the unfit men 

^ A. Newsholme and T. H. C. Stevenson: The DecHne of Human FertiUty in 
the United Kingdom, etc. Jour, of Royal Statis. Soc, London, 1906, vol. 69, pp. 
34-87. 

^ J. W. Taylor, The Diminishing Birth Rate — Presidential Address before 
British Gynecological Society, Feb. 11, 1904. BaUiere, London, 1904. 

3 G. W. Yule, On the Changes in the Marriage and Birth Rates in England and 
Wales During the past Half Century. Jour, of Royal Statis. Soc, 1906, vol. 69, pp. 
88-147. 

^ The Fertihty of the Unfit. Whitcombe, London, 1903, p. 127. 



43° EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and sterilize unfit women by tubo-ligature which is relatively 
safe and painless. High grade imbecile girls just able to earn 
their livelihood are most fecund of all sources of degenerates, 
and criminal women should be allowed to choose between the 
alternatives of surgery sterility or life imprisonment, and the 
wife of a bad or diseased man at the end of his sentence 
should be offered an operation or a divorce at her option. 
Induced sterility should rank with induced abortion as a crime 
except where defined. Voluntary restraint within the marriage 
relation is impractical. Whether a great increase of mankind 
within the next generation is desirable is very doubtful. 

The fatalism of heredity is a favorite theme for novelists. 
Zola showed how blood relations bring prolific but worthless 
progeny in his romance of Adelaid Fouque, who married a 
Rougon, and later Macquart. Freytag's " Ahnen " traces a 
family through several centuries to show how constant their 
strong, good traits, in varied, diverse social strata were of 
little influence on heredity. Also T. Manns Buddenbrook's 
description of a family of a great vigor and eminence slowly 
broken down financially, socially and morally by two inter- 
marriages with a decadent, morbid stock, is illustrative. Gor- 
don's " Sebald " has many admirable representations of hered- 
ity. Alfred Book's " Der Kuppelhof " describes a son who 
inherited vagabondage of his father in the fine form of an 
exorbitant fancy which caused him to break off an engagement 
at the last moment by an outbreak of strange peculiarities. 

W. Schallmayer ^ thinks that the classes who succeed in 
life tend to sterility. Of 150 professors 88 were fifty years or 
over and these had 3.8 children each. Theologians come from 
larger families and still have more children, but the number 
declines with each generation. The families from which the 
younger professors come are smaller than those from which 
the older ones come. The wives of the latter come from large 
families and a small death rate for the children. Artists 
spring from families averaging over six children while they 
themselves had only 2.4 each. The same law was found to hold 
for men in service of the state, for merchants, manufacturers 

^ Die soziologische Bedeutung des Nachwuchses der Begabteren und die 
psychische Vererbung. Archiv f. Rassen- u. Gesellschafts-Biol., 1905, vol. 2, pp. 
36-75- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 431 

and most brain workers. Blaschko, Steinmetz, Odin and 
Candolle found talent was rarely inherited. Odin found that 
of 286 eminent judges two thirds had not a single relative of 
mark. 

B. Revesz ^ has collected data from many lands to show 
that other things being equal, younger children are taller 
than older children. " The younger the mother the smaller 
are the children." He even goes so far as to attribute the small 
stature of the Japanese to the fact that girls marry so young, 
while among the tall Scots, Swedes, Norwegians, the average 
age of marriage is older. Again he seeks to show that the 
percentage of those who remain unmarried increases with the 
average age of marriage. Thus, the older the age of mater- 
nity, the taller the children. The evidence that weight follows 
the same law has been brought forward by T. Kezmarszky.- 
The evidence here is as yet even less conclusive. Where the 
law applies it appears to apply alike to the height and weight of 
the newborn and also of adults. Lubbock and Woinsky 
have collected data which convince them that the swords and 
their handles in prehistoric times, especially in the Bronze 
Age, were made for people with smaller hands than those in- 
habiting the same territory now. Petenkofer relates how at 
the crowning of Queen Victoria the ancient English armor 
was found too small for those who desired to use it. Pag- 
liani has pointed out that the Italians are taller now than for- 
merly. All these changes are ascribed by Revesz to the 
increasing age of the parents, particularly the mothers. 

J. Orschansky ^ based his studies upon 2,441 families with 
13,277 children. He divided these families into two types — 
one where the firstborn was a boy, and in these he found boys 
predominated ; the second where the firstborn was a girl and 
in these families girls predominated. The age of the mothers 
in the families of the second type he found less than that of 
mothers in families of the first type. The age of maximal fer- 
tility was greater in mothers of the first type than in those of 

• Der Einfluss des Alters der Mutter auf die Korperhohe. Archiv f. Anthropolo- 
gie, 1906, N. S. vol. 4, pp. 160-167. 

^ Klinische Mitteilungen. Enke, Stuttgart, 1884, 259 p. 

^ Die Vererbung im gesunden u. krankhaften Zustande. Enke, Stuttgart, 
^9°3, 347 P- 



432 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the second. He concludes that the sex energy of the father 
prevailed in the first and that of the mother in the second type. 
He also concluded that the cause which determines the sex of 
offspring was an hereditary morphological and physiological 
function of the entire organism, and especially of the sexual 
nature. Another important conclusion which his figures indi- 
cated was that sickly parents were more prone than healthy 
ones to transmit their sex to sickly children or those that inherit 
their own constitution. The greater the changeability of a 
part of the skeleton the greater is its influence upon heredi- 
tability of that part. Men show a greater variabihty and 
women more stability of skeleton. The length of children at 
birth increases with the age of the mother, reaching its maxi- 
mum when she is twenty-eight, which he thinks marks the 
apex of her greatest power to transmit her own qualities and 
even her own sex. We may regard every child of greater 
body length as a representative of the male type. There are 
more sickly children among the firstborn than among those 
born later. If both parents are feeble the later children are 
more likely to escape the inheritance of their disease. Nerv- 
ous parents have a special proclivity to transmit their sex and 
their type to children, especially to the sickly ones. There is 
greater clanger of progressive degeneration when the father 
is sickly than when the mother is so, more for boys than for 
girls, and this tendency is greater for those parents whose 
diseases are organic than for those suffering from functional 
troubles. Similarity is more uniformly divided in healthy 
families, but in sickly families there is a predominance of 
similarity of boys with the father. 

G. Heimann,^ foreshowing the dangers of tuberculosis for 
both mother and child, urges that physicians should prevent 
all such births by causing abortions. He also shows that 
every individual and moral motivation should be used to its 
fullest extent because of the strong propensities it patents of 
this disease. C. Ehrenfels,^ of Prague, thinks even monogamy, 

* Das tuberkulose Weib in der Schwangerschaft und der Arzt. Medizinische 
Klinik, 1907, vol. 3, pp. 538-544. 

^ Die konstitutive Verderblichkeit der Monogamie und die Unentbehrlichkeit 
einer Sexualreform. Archiv f. Rassen- u. Gesellschafts-Biologie, 1907, vol. 4, pp. 
615-651 and 803-830. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 433 

which has done great good, must be modified to save the race. 
He doubts Westermarck that this has been the chief fashion 
among primitive men. Hence he tentatively suggests a new 
procreative hygiene and sex morahty. He would have boys 
studied very carefully through all the school grades and have 
all modes of education adjusted to bring out their best points 
of character. Those found to be-superior should be allowed 
to revert to primitive conditions where the best male qualities, 
courage, prowess, idealism were stimulated to win the female 
and a few such elite specimens should not be limited to one 
mate of the other sex. The chief work of the school should 
be to standardize the best potential parents. The same should 
be the goal of the army. All should be constantly judged and 
compared with prize bonuses and so forth for virile selection 
and preventive measures against the multiplication of the 
lower types and should be constantly kept in mind. He insists 
that love antics among animals and among primitive men are 
not simply to win good will but so that the male can be po- 
tentialized. These radical views have at least been listened to 
in Germany. 

No doubt child marriage is a potent factor of race de- 
terioration in India. Of ten million, from five to ten years old, 
one fifth were married and half of those between ten and 
fifteen. These unions with older men result in precocity and 
early rob girls of their freshness and weaken their maternal 
functions. Thus the system decreases fertility and some think 
makes this race so susceptible to every plague and pestilence 
and paralyzes the will in famines. This, Ibidsson thinks, ex- 
plains the fact that three hundred million people have tamely 
submitted to English dominion and extortion. 

J. Miiller ^ thinks that we must revise the ideas of primi- 
tive marriage that have come down from Bachofen through 
MacLennan, Lubbock, Morgan, Post, and Kobler, and argues 
for a period, monogamy before totemism, group marriages 
and Mutterrecht. On the contrary, promiscuity, whether as 
a community of wives or of hetairism, does not exist, but 
everywhere there is a tendency to durable unions. If incor- 
porated by the so-called higher races, we often find an acute 

* Das sexuelle Leben der Naturvolker. Grieben, Leipzig, 1902, 73 p. 
29 



434 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ethical sense ; " a fine ethical sense and a heroic self-sacrifice 
that gives us with a millennium of culture much to learn and 
to think of." There are very few of the lowest races who do 
not refrain from sex relations during both pregnancy and 
lactation, although this custom has been one of the motives of 
polygamy. Nearly every race has a long list of restraints 
upon the sexual instinct which are often exceedingly eflfective. 
Marriage can only be within certain limited and carefully de- 
fined degrees of relationship. The Aztecs required a suspen- 
sion of the marital relation for four days after marriage. The 
initiations at puberty often reenforce with cruel sanctions the 
motives of continence. There are long sex disciplines that 
precede marriage. Hardships, wounds, fasts, vigils, delays of 
many kinds are enforced upon people who are often ab- 
ject slaves of custom, and all these vestiges originated in the 
profound sense of the necessity of self-control. So the celibate 
orders which abounded in ancient Egypt, in India, in Bud- 
dhistic lands and elsewhere illustrate the same effort. There 
is plenty of evidence that monogamy and asceticism are the 
aboriginal possession of early man and that many, if not most 
of the baser forms of sex relation came later. R. Rocholl ^ 
well says, " The more material we acquire for the study of 
lower races, and the more we understand their states of mind, 
so much more sense and reason do we find among them." 

Pedigrees and genealogies furnish very important data for 
the study of eugenics. Most are naturally more interested 
in the history of their own families than of others and it is 
surprising to see how in recent years studies of real scientific 
value in this field have taken the place of the old type of 
family book made up entirely of names, dates, and places. 
■ What is now sought is a record more like what physicians 
wish in seeking to trace the hereditary symptoms of their pa- 
tients except that the eugenicist is more interested in tracing 
back the good traits. Mendelism has not only given a new 
impulse but taught us how to make these studies more profit- 
able. W. L. Liitgendorff-Leinburg,^ e. g., advocates systematic 

' Philosophic der Geschichte. Vandenhoeck, Gottingen, 1878-93, 2 vols. See 
vol. 2, p. 485. 

^ Familiengeschichte, Stammbaum und Ahnenprobe. Rommel, Frankfurt am 
Main, 1890, 129 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 435 

genealogies, calendars, registers, family histories, trees, etc., 
and would have every great family organize and elect a 
chronicler who should gather and tabulate all available facts 
concerning every member of it, living and dead. The fam- 
ily archives it would thus develop could support each other 
by exchanges and could correlate indefinitely with related 
branches to the end of greater self-knowledge for each in- 
dividual member. This would be of great service for the 
further study of heredity on a broader human basis and would 
supplement history and furnish those who are to write in the 
future with valuable data. J. Grober ^ describes how in the 
sixteenth century German noblemen began to make general ef- 
forts to preserve their pedigrees, although this was done very 
crudely. Recently attention has been called to the high biolog- 
ical value of properly kept pedigrees by men like Bollinger, 



n = man 
O = woman 

I = individual 

II = parents 

III =: grandparents 




Grober's Diagram Showing How Number of Ancestors Increases 
FOR Each Individual. 

Martins, Lorenz, Strohmeyer, Kekule, von Stradonitz, etc. 
The number of our forebears doubles every generation. In 

1 Die Bedeutung der Ahnentafel f. d. biolog. Erblichkeitsforschung. Archiv 
f. Rassen- u. Gesellschafts-Biologie, 1904, vol. i, pp. 664-681. 



436 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

fifty-seven generations we have 130 quadrillion ancestors, or 
two raised to its fifty-seventh power, which is far more than 
all the men now living on earth. The above numbers are too 
large because they do not all represent different persons — 
that is, the same individuals often recur as is seen in the mar- 
riage of relatives. Lorenz has figured out what he calls an- 
cestral loss. In fact, the whole human race is in a sense re- 
lated or else it would not be one species. How is this con- 
nected with the monophyletic theory? All individuals who 
are not fertile are excluded from every ancestral table. 

It is a very great question as to whether we inherit equally 
from each one of the ancestors in one of the above rows and 
what are the laws of reversion, prepotence, sexual transference, 
etc. Moreover, in this way, too, we can study hereditary 
Be lashing and if we have a comprehensive table can get good 
ideas of morbid tendencies. Often now the entire mass of 
heredity is so distributed that one half is ascribed to the par- 
ents, one fourth to the grandparents, one eighth to the great- 
grandparents, and so on. Whether this numerical distribution 
is correct it is hard to say, but it is a convenient scheme. 
Atavism may even play a great role in the origin of new 
varieties. Variation does more than simply add and subtract. 
We ought to be able to estimate hereditary values and draw 
laws concerning the origin and decay of qualities in general, 
of the effects of inbreeding, etc. All these qualities seem to be 
transmitted without any general tendency to enlarge the germ 
cell. The microscope cannot discover any distinction in the 
structure of the cell of different species to show differences of 
race or family. Parents transmit to the children their pro- 
toplasm and in the early stages of life the loss seems to be 
about the same whether for an animal low or high in the scale, 
or even for plants. Kekule has made special genealogies of 
the extinct families of the Spanish Hapsburgs. 

By blackening the dots in the preceding diagram to repre- 
sent different diseases we ought to be able to show their laws 
of transmission. 

Professor R. Sommer, of Giessen, well known for his writ- 
ing on psychiatry and criminology, has traced ^ a family named 

^ Familienforschung und Vererbungslehre. Earth, Leipzig, 1907, p. 232. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 437 

Soldan from a Turk who settled in Germany in 1300, a.d., 
down to the present, giving some record of several and a 
fuller account of fourteen of his descendants who attained 
more or less eminence. He finds most of those members of 
this family whose lives afford, sufficient data for judgment 
characterized by high-mindedness, active artistic ability and 
a unique and vivid style. A number have marked gifts for 
physics and mathematics, and those who have left books or 
other writings behind were endowed with a lively imagination, 
a copious vocabulary, and a love of detail or history, topog- 
raphy and natural science. To what the writer thinks a 
family propensity to keep pedigrees and write family histories, 
the author owes his very exceptionally copious genealogical 
material. Pronounced individuality and a passion for per- 
sonal freedom made them all, for generations, ardent Protes- 
tants. Perhaps their most marked trait was a gift of optic, 
plastic representation which crops out over and over again and 
seems to have been transmitted to and through the female 
members of the stirp. While no very solid inference can be 
based on one family, however large, and while even this record 
includes but a few of all the descendants of their Turkish 
ancestor, the author believes it to be of value. It seems to 
show anew that every individual is a branch of his family tree, 
that talent is often innate and may become patent or remain 
latent and unsuspected according as circumstances favor or 
retard. The power of adaptation increases with endogenous 
variation and where there are reversions, they are often to the 
traits of the mother's ancestors. Perhaps in man as in plants, 
hybrids contain two kinds of germs; one that reproduces hy- 
brids, and another normal individuals with dominant and 
recessive qualities. Sommer would have us all develop an in- 
tense consciousness of family and even race and keep in per- 
manent form a register of the items of biological importance 
in our family to be transmitted to our remotest offspring. He 
even desiderates a full characterization of the conditions of 
conception, pregnancy, and confinement, as well as a record 
of childhood, its education, important hygienic and cultural 
experiences, how the crisis of adolescence was achieved, with 
memoranda of courtship, wedlock, tastes, achievements, ill- 
nesses, and death. 



43^ EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Dr. F. A. Woods ^ made a careful study of 832 members 
of European Royal houses, incidentally referring to no less 
than 3,312 persons. Of each of his preferred lists he quoted 
the adjectives and other characterizations used by historians 
and biographers as the basis of his estimate and thus divided 
his kings and queens into two series of ten grades each, one 
for mental and another for moral qualities. He finds that it 
is very hard to find any information of the pedigree of even 
royalty on the maternal side, family trees being usually reck- 
oned in the male line. The study of heredity, however, requires 
equal knowledge of all the ancestors of the backward diverging 
line. Woods picked up every individual in the pedigree so far 
as he could, and in this way considers the Royal Houses of 
England, Germany, France, Spain, Austria, Russia, Sweden, 
etc., with the aid of many portraits and with considerable 
use of Karl Pearson's methods, but rather in Galton's spirit. 
He concludes that neither luxury nor close intermarriage has 
produced degenerate royal families; that is, that there is no 
decadence in them due to their exalted position per se. Pol- 
lutions have arisen through the relation of male members with 
degenerate families. While some branches decline, others have 
steadily improved. Perhaps no other 800 random names of a 
class would yield the twenty-five world geniuses he finds here. 
His study suggests that kings waged war leading to a survival 
of the fittest to attain their position, that their exclusive ranks 
were recruited by fresh grafts from vigorous personalities 
who won their way into the royal field. Thus the very for- 
mation of such a family is due to selection in ability, the first 
tenth on the virtue scale, and vice versa, showing the distinct 
correlation between mental and moral traits, and suggesting 
that improvement of each tends to better the other. The in- 
ference here is that riches and luxury do not make for de- 
generation. Pearson showed that commoners do not mate 
pangamously, but like tends to choose like assertively, and 
even found that husband and wife in some traits are more alike 
than are uncle and niece, or than first cousins. Woods finds 
nothing to refute this view, but his studies do not sustain the 
theory of free and thorough blending of qualities, but afford 

1 Mental and Moral Heredity in Royalty. Holt, N. Y., 1906, 312 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 439 

many examples of at least partial alternative inheritance. 
Heredity he thinks " almost the entire cause of mental 
achievements of these men and women, and that environment 
or free will must consequently play very minor roles." Envi- 
ronment is " a totally inadequate explanation " of intellectual 
life. When strong contrasts are found among the children, 
they are always found among the ancestors, but the environ- 
ment affects lower organisms most and higher attributes 
least. Selection is of prime, and education of only subordi- 
nate, importance. Not enough is acquired to be inherited. 
Traits found in one parent and in half the ancestry will prob- 
ably appear with equal force in one out of every two descend- 
ants. Traits possessed by neither parent, but by all the 
ancestry, would also have one chance in two of appearance in 
the children. Mental and moral qualities blend so little that a 
child will probably resemble rather completely one of his an- 
cestors rather than another. 

Few more practical or striking illustrations of heredity 
are known than those due to the campaigns of the First Napo- 
leon who, it is estimated, was responsible for the death of from 
two to three millions of the strongest, most able-bodied young 
men, the very flower of their respective countries. These 
millions who perished on the battle field left few or no off- 
spring. And all soldiers, even those who return, leave weaker 
members of their sex home to propagate offspring. This is 
pulling up the corn for the sake of the weeds. One result 
upon France of these long wars is that the minimal stature 
which France requires for her soldiers has been twice reduced 
so that Figaro not long since represented La Grande Nation 
extending her hands and saying, " Suffer little children to 
come unto me for of such is the Army of France." ^ Wars 
thus always interfere with eugenics by cutting off the best dur- 
ing the years most favorable for procreation, while promiscu- 
ous charity, on the other hand, interferes by preventing elimi- 
nation of the worst and often enabling them to propagate with 

' See Otto Seeck's Geschichte des Untergangs der antiken Welt, 1901-1910, 6 v. 
In his chapter on the extermination of the best he has shown how not only France 
but Greece, Rome, Babylon's decline and fall came from want of men. " Vir gave 
place to homo." See also D. S. Jordan's The Blood of the Nation. American 
Unitarian Assoc, Boston, 1903, 82 p. 



440 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS - 

great fecundity. We must not, however, forget that the army 
now in the best nations, e. g., Germany, is a splendid school 
for both body keeping, physical, mental and even moral devel- 
opment especially under the new educative policies, while, 
especially in times of war, the armies are great schools of 
courage, discipline and patriotism. 

Thus I have in the above merely sampled a few of the 
salient facts and fields of eugenics only in order to raise the 
question of the pedagogic place, value, and method of this new 
subject in an educational system. I hold that its rudiments 
should be in some way imparted to every boy and girl in the 
j ; early teens and that it should be continued in high school and 
' ' in college. Rightly taught it gives a new apperception organ 
for history, for sociology, and reveals the biologic basis that 
underlies all human institutions and achievements. It enables 
the pupil to understand, too, a number of the most basal mo- 
tives of morals and religion. It sublimates the intense natural 
interest in sex during the teens, long-circuits, elevates it, and 
besides great intellectual there lie in it also even greater moral 
possibilities. It broadens the historic sense by showing the 
individual's relations to both his ancestors and to posterity, 
and inculcates the sacredness of the immortality of the germ- 
plasm which must be served as a center of supreme interest in 
all human affairs. Nothing has opened to the pedagogue such 
a sudden, new wealth of matter and method or such a new 
min-e of interest, which it now remains to work for all it 
is worth. This part of sex pedagogy is perhaps as remote as 
possible and in many respects is a diametrical opposite of the 
pedagogy of a sex disease, for the former opens one of the 
most encouraging vistas into the future and suggests that 
circa fifteen hundred million people alive on the earth to-day 
are not only merely a handful but are only pygmoids and per- 
haps mattoids of nobler generations of men that are to tenant 
\ the earth long after we are gone. Eugenics, too, is now great- 

v't^/ NT^y needed to counterpoise relatively every excessive emphasis 
^ ^ laid by educators of all grades upon the social aspects of life 
^ and training. This on the contrary reminds us that individual- 
"\ ity has its needs and duties and must be more effectively 
stressed to bring things again to harmony. Again, in our 
close relations to our fellow men we must not forg^et our fore- 



— THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 441 

bears to whom we owe either adoration, like the Chinese 
ancestor worship, or curses, Hke the sad hero of Ibsen's 
" Ghosts." If we would utilize all the natural interest which 
has limitless possibilities of quickening not only the mind but 
morals, it may be that we should be able to find and keep in 
mind a settled but very important line, which men and espe- 
cially women need to know, between normal effort and over- 
drawing our powers so that we shall not take out of our system 
more than it can bear. 

Only by many kinds of effort and by trying many methods shall 
we be able to develop the true pedagogy of this fascinating subject. 
I hesitate to append here the method which I myself have repeatedly 
used to introduce a single aspect of the subject with high-school 
girls and boys together. I first ask : How many of you have grand- 
parents ? How many can name all four of them ? We then find out 
how many who have them were born during the civil war, 1860-65, 
and how many of them died in the war. We then go back to the 
eight great grandparents and to the sixteen great great grandparents. 
This takes us somewhere near the year 1800. We can then go back 
five generations in which the pupils had 32 ancestors, near the 
strong minds of 1776 and the Declaration of Independence. Surely 
with so many in this generation nearly all whose families were then 
living in this country must have had revolutionary sires. Thus we 
go back always noting the important historical events, the days of 
Cromwell, Columbus, the Magna Charta, and back perhaps some 
thirty generations till we get to a.d. 900, the day of Otho the Great. 
This tends to bring a sense of vital connection with the past and a 
certain pride of lineage. 

If, instead of recording three generations per century we record 
four as is nearly right with the low classes, the increase is still more 
rapid. Now the wisdom and folly of pedigree can be mentioned. 
All might be exhorted to keep family registers, to look up old Bibles, 
to interest themselves in their own family tree and a certain few ■ 
lessons might be suggested. Jordan says that probably all young 
people to-day have had among their numerous ancestors certain 
kings and queens, but adds that they have also had murderers who 
have been executed on the gibbet. How we all hope that most of 
our ancestors were strong and healthy in body as well as good ! How 
we wish they could foresee our interest in their health and virtue ! 
They, however, have not fated us, for there are sports, geniuses 
from low families, as well as stupids from good ones. Haeckel figures 
five million generations in man's pedigree. We all inherit many 
great possibilities from this dense cloud of witnesses that have gone 
before us. One ounce of good heredity is beyond all price. All 
the best things in us are there because our ancestors did not drink, 



442 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

debauch themselves, or lay the dead hand of heredity upon us to 
handicap or blight our lives. 

Now^ from the past let us turn to the future. Here we have no 
facts or history but only possibilities. Suppose a pair married to- 
day in 1910, produced and reared 4 children. Thirty-five years later, 
in 1945, their children marry and rear 4 children. In 1980, or 35 
years later, these marry and produce 4, in 2015 another, in 2050 still 
another, in 2080 yet another, and by 2120 another generation is 
produced. At this latter date, then, the single pair married to-day 
would have produced 128 offspring in a single generation, or 252 
offspring during all these generations. We have only to figure this 
out to carry this simple doubling on, reckoning some 3 generations 
per century, and if the rate of increase kept up, before the end of 
the 26th century of our era, people marrying now would have over 
2,000,000 offspring in a single generation. Some of you may be 
thus prolific. If your families were larger and all lived you would 
have a still larger number of descendants. But of course this will 
come to but very few of you. Some will die, some will never marry, 
some will have no, others few, children, and these may die. Think 
how all who come after us, whether few or many, are entirely de- 
pendent upon our health, upon our virtue, and think how sad it is 
to often see people die well on in years who leave no children, so that 
the line and perhaps the very name becomes entirely extinct ! Back- 
ward it goes to the very dawn of life but here the family becomes 
extinct. This often happens here in New England in the region 
of abandoned farms. 

Thus, we realize that the fifteen hundred million people alive to- 
day are only a mere handful compared with those who are to come 
after us. Of course there have been constant extinctions. Animal 
species have died out for very many reasons, because they did not 
fit or adjust to their environment, were weak, diseased, preyed upon. 
Human institutions die. Not a living person to-day worships Jove, 
who for the proudest races on earth in classical times was father 
of gods and men. All this teaches that we are simply trustees of 
our lives. Our faculties constitute the crew to navigate the ship 
from the port of departure, which is birth, to the port of destination, 
which is death. Now if we overdraw our energies or squander in 
selfish indulgence or sin powers that were meant to insure the life, 
health and happiness of posterity, we are like sailors that mutiny, 
break into the hold, loot the cargo and set up as pirates. Honor, 
or the instincts that make a gentleman and a lady, when we inter- 
pret them aright, is living for the interests of the unborn. As to 
charities, we, of course, need to help the defectives, for it does us 
good. But the best ought to survive and to receive most care. In 
many lands to-day the human harvest is not satisfactory. This must 
change or these nations will go the way of ancient Rome and Greece, 
or Burbank's plants that would not develop higher species. Such 
races, like condemned machinery, will go to the scrap heap or the 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 443 

dump. Nations must not breed from inferior specimens any more 
than farmers, for neither can long endure the law of diminishing 
returns. 

Sex and Its Pedagogy Before Puberty. — It has generally 
been assumed that in the regimen of children before the teens, 
sex needed little attention because it hardly existed. It was 
enough to protect them from local excitement and keep them 
from seeing or hearing things gross or indecent. Recent in- 
vestigations, however, indicate that this is a very grave mis- 
take. Not only has Bell,^ who collected scores of cases of 
ardent love life in children under twelve, even, indeed, as 
young as five, three or even two years of age, shown that the 
affection was manifestly more or less of the adult type, but 
Freud - has described a boy of five years whose chief interest 
centered in sex, which became his chief apperception organ. 

C. G. Jung ^ gives a pathetic case of a four-year-old girl who, 
incited thereto by the birth of a brother, developed moods of reverie, 
dreams, and manifold questionings concerning where children came 
from. There were several partial theories that evolved in her brain : 
one was that when old people died they became little children. When 
asked just before what she would do if a brother came that night, 
she declared she would kill, i. e., remove it. When she first saw her 
mother afterwards, there was dismay and a disposition to keep away, 
and a very cool reception. One theory, however, was that her 
mother now must die because a new life had come. Toward the 
uniformed nurse she was very hostile at first. She insisted that the 
brother did not belong to her ; treated her doll as the nurse did the 
baby; hummed reverie songs unconsciously of a new melancholy 
tone, which analysis showed were introversions. Jealousy was plain. 
Again, father ^nd mother were called liars. There were many 
questionings how the nurse got the baby, what the mother had to do 
with it, whether she would be like the nurse or like the mother whom 
she was sure did not get the child in the same way as the nurse did. 
There was a strong sense that something was being concealed from 
her and great resistance to this. There were various infantile de- 
vices for securing love by force or strategy, . such as crying and 
calling the mother by night, for which the Messina earthquake was 

' Sanford Bell, A Preliminary Study of the Emotion of Love Between the Sexes. 
Amer. Jour, of Psy., July, 1902, vol. 13, pp. 325-354. 

^ Sigmund Freud, Analyse der Phobic eines fiinfjahrigen Knaben. Jahrb. f. 
psychoanalyt. und psychopathol. Forschungen, 1909, vol. i, pp. 1-109. 

3 Association Method, tr. by Dr. A. A. Brill, of New York. Amer. Jour, of Psy., 
April, 1910, vol. 21, pp. 201-269, 



444 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

held responsible. There was great fear that introversion was in 
danger of becoming a neurosis. Finally, she was told the truth but 
found it hard to understand how the infant could get out of the 
mother's body by itself — it must come from the mouth or some open- 
ing in the breast — but this was so hard to understand that she fell 
back to the stork theory for a time. Slowly her curiosity was 
directed toward the lower part of the body and then there was a 
long and persistent error which was hard to control as to the orifice 
it emerged from. The child evolved a concept of a big brother, 
which seems to have been to her what her father was to her mother. 
This big brother is brave, lives in dangerous Italy, so that the earth- 
quake fear vanished. Among other children she now became an 
apostle of the doctrine that every child grew in its parents. The 
father being ill one day in bed was thought also soon to have a 
child. A symbolic dream of Noah's ark, where animals came out 
from beneath instead of as in her real ark from a lid in the top, 
imaged a rectification of her own ideas. She soon developed a wish 
to be present with her parents alone and sit up with them late at 
night, the motivation of which of course she did not understand. 
Then came back the earthquake dreams, then a curiosity to see spring 
when the flowers came out, which she associated with the way the 
brother arrived. Evidently the flowers and earthquakes had some 
association. Later she began to throw her doll into the closet as- 
suming that thus she had come nearer to the question that was 
agitating her. A favorite game was putting a doll under her clothes 
and drawing it out, which was evidently a kind of question. She 
associated a woman about to bear a child with a flower; proposed 
to swallow fruit to have a baby; this marked the beginning of the 
subconscious quest for the ulterior origin of babies. There were 
several painful dreams, that she was crushed, buried, drowned, show- 
ing that there was again fear in the air and resistance against trans- 
position on the parents, showing that much love was again con- 
verted into fear, but now the suspicion was directed against the 
father, who must know the secret. This is common in dementia 
prcecox. It had to be explained to her that eyes were not planted in 
the head, for this was the first form of the seed theory. Many were 
the questions as to how the baby got into mamma. Finally, the father 
explained delicately and there was much exultation with the assump- 
tion that she knew but the mother did not. Out of these elements 
and the tensions may arise many forms of precociousness and 
neurosis, if these complexes are not attended to. There is great 
suffering from errors here, but wisdom is very hard and with feeble 
children there is a necessity of great discretion. The literature in 
this field sheds much new light upon the psychogenesis in the indi- 
vidual. Hereditary moments incited by the various items of experi- 
ence pop up in the most fragmentary way, now in a dream, now in a 
reverie, now a question, now a very conscious anxiety that may be 
prolonged indefinitely, and only after considerable time does the 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 445 

finished product of clear and simple knowledge in this field arise. 
Men, and especially women, are essentially organs o£ heredity, so 
that this knowledge is of the most vital consequence for life, and 
plays a more organic role in the evolution of the soul than any other 
type of knowledge. 

The chief evidence of active sex life in young children, 
however, rests upon the results of psycho-analysis, which has 
led Freud and his now rapidly growing school to the conclu- \ 
sion that nearly all neuroses, if not most of the psychoses of \ 
later life, rest back upon and have their ultimate origin in some \ 
lesion or trauma of the vita sexualis before puberty, perhaps I 
averaging about the age of eight or nine. It is surprising to ,' 
see how many cases of these disorders, which constitute so 
large a part of the literature of this school, started in some 
strong and sometimes sudden sex experience by which topics 
in this field were forced upon or kept in mind in an abnormal 
way or to an excessive degree. Nervous children, especially 
girls, and most of all those that are very delicate, if not 
slightly neurotic, are peculiarly vulnerable almost from infancy 
to these influences. This new conception now evolving is that 
what we have been accustomed to call sex is a composite of \ 
many elements, some of which are manifest almost at birth, < 
and that these components develop more or less independently ( 
at first, that all tend to have their fling, one after another, and j 
then some are repressed by shame or by censure and perhaps \ 
fall out entirely as do some rudimentary organs that vanish as / 
the body grows. Others are only inhibited in their outward / 
manifestations but persist, often with great vigor, below con- ^ 
sciousness, where they are in all stages of submergence, often /' 
quite beyond the reach of voluntary attention. The rest of ^ 
these components are during puberty, if it is normal, united S 
and organized together under the leadership of the sexual 
zone and become known as sexual. These components as they 
exist in children consist of what is common to both sexes and 
constitute, then, sex neuters, and they can later enter into the 
constellations of either sex, though in different proportions, i^' 
These components have their outcrop in specific traits, e. g., 
passionate sucking {Lutchen, Liideln, and W onne-saugen) , 
interest in all that pertains to both excrementations, various 
auto-eroticisms which may later evolve into self-abuse. Then 



446 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

from being self-caused these propensities take on more ob- 
jective forms, chiefly three : ( i) extreme aggressiveness, which 
\ may on the one hand sink to sadism or be subhmated and 
/' spirituahzed into creativeness, originahty, later on; (2) ab- 
) normal passivity, receptivity, which may lapse to masochism 
t or the desire to suffer pain and rise to heights of receptivity, 
I even to divine influences; (3) exhibitionism or the impulse to 
i show off, which has many high and low forms. Each of these 
crude instincts may act more or less erethically and become an 
independent source of pleasure, which is at bottom or else 
merges over into libido. Nothing is so plastic as these ele- 
ments, for in themselves and in their combinations they con- 
tain the very best and the very poorest traits of human nature. 
If the great extension of our former views concerning sex 
thus called for is correct, then the young child is in a sense 
even more dominated by sex components than the adolescent, 
for there are more of them since some are eliminated or re- 
pressed before the age of reconstruction and they are both 
unconscious and independent, and hence are stronger. Again, 
for these reasons they are far more prone to lapse to physical 
disease, the symptoms of which are precipitations of erotic 
feeling. All the horrible perversions of sex, too, are only 
y/^exaggerations or aggravations of tendencies normal to every 
\ child, whereas, on the other hand, art, science, religion, all of 

\ ^them are surrogate satisfactions. Thus, only part of the 

original libido factors are organized to conserve the function 
of procreation, and the rest make up the greater part of human 
weal or woe. If these new views are correct, it follows that 
sex pedagogy must not only begin in the cradle but is cardinal 
for the education of the feelings, will, and intellect, and that sex, 
not as we now know it but in this larger sense, contains the 
promise and potency of life, that the complete man or woman 
is a complicated product of many devices that are slowly 
wrought out during many metamorphoses in order to accom- 
plish in the end the one and supreme goal of life, viz., the gen- 
eration of our kind. From the first moment after birth. Nature 
begins to prepare the infant for future parenthood and all else 
I is secondary and tributary to this. To those who study this 
new dispensation of sex and do not know children in a deep 
I and all-sided way, it seems unwarranted ; nor to those alienists 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 447 

who think that the patient can judge of his own states of mind 
rather than that their interpretation is the goal, will this seem 
satisfactory; nor will it to those who think that if we admit 
that sex perversions originate in germ in all young children, 
our thoughts of them are necessarily degraded. But to those 
who understand how idealism and imagination root in sex, / ^ 
as does most that is best in adult life, this view will exalt and 
ennoble childhood. This is not the place for details concerning 
the psychological view that has brought more unity and in- 
sight into'^the^vefy "nature and operations of the soul, and the 
mechanism of the conscience than any other in our generation. , 
It marks the end of the old and the dawn of a new era. It is / 
tlie^Tnost triumphant vindication of the genetic mode of con- / 
ceiving the mind and marks an epoch in psychogenesis. This // 
is true quite apart from its bearings upon sex, for it includes 7 
a far wider domain which cannot even be glanced at here. ' 
Into the whole domain of sex, however, it brings sudden order 
and harmony by showing the relations between the different 
morbid manifestations among themselves and between these and 
normal activities and coordinates many factors, the bearings 
of which were before entirely unknown, obviates persistent 
misunderstandings for both health and disease, and gives sex, 
which had been neglected by all contemptuously and dismissed 
by some psychologists as of the slightest significance, its right- t"""^ 
ful and dominant place. 

Prepubertal sex pedagogy, therefore, has its own peculiar 
problems, some of which, however, can hardly be stated dei-.._™, 
initely save in a medical treatise. In general the inculcation I 
is to avoid all erethic states, even in the nursery, beginning ' 
with those of sucking itself, which the rubber nipple very dis- 
tinctly favors. Parents must realize that the masturbatory 
diathesis may be cultivated by excessive coddling, by frictions 
anywhere, especially pattings and strokings that tend to cres- 
cendo or culminating sensations. Habitual constipation, too, 
is a direct provocative and can sometimes be more or less 
voluntary even if unconscious in the interests of these hedonic 
physical experiences. Coprophilic tendencies have perhaps a 
natural place and stage but they normally soon abate beyond 
the power of a revival even by disease. Intense spasms of 
feeling and emotion, periods of phrenetic aggressiveness, pave 



448 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the way for erogenisms. The love of being handled may be- 
come abnormal and in such cases has its own dangers. Nudity 
is often a passion of children and has a unique pedagogic 
value of its own in its place which the Spartans, who required 
periodic stripping to see whether youth were vigorous and 
virtuous, perhaps understood how to utilize. Freud has him- 
self dealt with some aspects of this topic.^ He has little sym- 
pathy with the fear that simple explanations made to young 
children will awaken premature or abnormal interest but 
thinks concealment particularly calculated to do this. It is 
false that children have no interest or intelligence for these 
matters unless it be artificially awakened. Nor would he have 
this instruction conveyed indirectly. In an interesting letter, 
Multatuli (edited by W. Spohr, 1906), although admitting 
that thought should be kept pure, recognizes that this is im- 
possible under present conditions, and urges that children 
strongly and early come to feel that something is being con- 
cealed from them, and therefore their curiosity is kept at un- 
wholesomely high pitch and that this artificial tension both 
heats the feeling and corrupts the fancy. Parents, he says, 
live in a fool's paradise. The parts directly involved are by no 
means the only ones in children that mediate sex sensations, 
which are often auto-erotic. Now it is the excessive develop- 
ments of these uncorrelated elements and the errors in their 
pubertal organization that cause perversions and neuroticisms 
later and but for Geheimtuerei many of these dangers could 
be avoided. The zest of the child for the riddles of this aspect 
of life are awakened very early. They should not be repressed 
too abruptly by being called dirty or guilty. 

Perhaps next to interest in organs is the problem of the 
origin of children. Here Freud quotes a letter of a motherless 
girl of eleven and a half to her aunt, asking with the greatest 
naivete whether the stork found children in the ditch and if so, 
why they are never seen there and ending, " I beg you, write to 

* Sigmund Freud : Zur sexuellen Aufklarung der Kinder. Soziale Medizin und 
Hygiene, 1907, vol. 2, pp. 360-367. Die infantile Sexualitat,in Drei Abhandlungen 
zur Sexualtheorie. Deuticke, Leipzig, 1Q05, 83 p. Origin and Development of 
Psychoanalysis. Amer. Jour, of Psy., April, 1910, vol. 21, pp. 181—200. Uber infan- 
tile Sexualtheorien. Mutterschutz, 1908, vol. 4, pp. 763-776. Charakter und 
Analerotik. Psy.-neur. Wochenschrift, 1908, vol. 9, pp. 465-467. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 449 

me fully, for you surely know where they come from." Later 
this little writer became neurotic and psycho-analysis showed 
that one element in her neuroses was the imperative Grilbelsucht 
concerning these more or less unconscious questions. The in- 
tense natural craving for knowledge at this stage is probably 
universal, and how rarely it is met is illustrated by the case of 
a lady teacher in the grades who found on her desk a letter 
signed round-robinwise by five of her best girls from ten to 
twelve years old, which read, " Please explain to us how men 
originate." The teacher was confounded and did not know 
what to do. She finally took the note to the master. He 
thought it too grave a question to deal with upon his own 
authority and took it to the superintendent. The superintend- 
ent was no less nonplused and appealed to the school commit- 
tee, who after sapient deliberations, suggested that the teacher 
ask the parents of these girls to answer the question to their 
daughters. These school authorities felt themselves either too 
timid, too ignorant, or unauthorized to give the desired in- 
formation. 

Love and hunger are often called the two master impulses 
of life. The food quest absorbs a large part of the time and 
energy of animals and of men. This has long been under- 
stood ; but only very lately, thanks to many special studies, are 
we realizing that the constellation of sex activities takes a 
hitherto undreamed-of proportion of energy for its solution ; 
during all the years of most rapid physical and mental growth. 
In no field is ignorance so dense, and false explanations that 
have to be tediously rectified or painfully moulted, so many. 
The stork legend and a score of foolish nursery inventions on 
this plane that appear in our questionnaire returns are at first 
accepted as an answer to the most vital and first of all the great 
questions which the child puts its parents with a faith so im- 
plicit that, when these silly answers begin to be doubted, a deep 
distrust of father and mother is implanted. They have given 
a false answer to the most serious of all the questions children 
ask them. Some children oscillate for months and years be- 
tween accepting the myths given them on parental authority 
and some other explanation of the street, perhaps very offensive 
to them, and weak ones often grow neurotic under the strain. 
Some become clever detectives and cross-examine wherever 
30 



450 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

they can to find out if their parents lied, and continue to change, 
modify, and perhaps revolutionize their conclusions in this field 
for a long time. Often the alternative view that the child came 
from some aperture in the mother's body is put in so revolting 
a form that they cling to the stork type of theory long after 
they should have known better, and are more or less stultified 
thereby. Sooner or later even the neglected or self-taught 
child is convinced that its parents deliberately lied to it and 
complotted to do so. 

Now arises the question why they did it ; and here begins 
another train of psychic processes which may undermine love 
and respect and, especially with neurotic children, may lead 
to the view that they are not true offspring of their parents. 
The child is now launched upon a troubled and pathless sea. 
Where do babies come from now that the testimony of the 
parents is proven false ? Or are the new theories veracious ? 
Almost incredible are the number of tentative hypotheses 
taken up and then abandoned, involving a large amount of 
merely unconscious cerebration that might have been better 
used. It is all so strange, secret, incredible; and especially to 
girls as they often hear it, is nauseating and perhaps cruel to 
certain souls; and to most in some modes, the monstrous and 
distorted new ideas darken and sadden life. Children cannot 
realize that they were born as they are told ; and the mother, 
and later the father, when his agency is known, seem degraded 
by the sex relation. Children often openly resent the thought 
of all such practices by their parents; while at the same time 
sometimes secretly spying and trying to find out. At this 
stage, if too much is too suddenly seen, weak nervous systems 
are sometimes indelibly wounded thereby. 

By the dawn of the school age, the child is already usually 
alert, conscious and curious, boys more openly, girls more 
covertly. Both accumulate a considerable body of misinfor- 
mation which must be slowly and tediously worn away by 
growing knowledge. I would not say, with my former German 
teacher of physiology, that two thirds of the total psychic 
processes of boys are for years concerned with sex directly 
or indirectly; but the amount of mentation that goes on in 
this field is incredible to most. We adults forget it because 
new insights have submerged the traces of old vagaries as in 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 45i 

no other domain. Moreover, the type of psychic activity is 
uniquely intimate and as unconscious as it is intense. Again, 
psycho-analysis which penetrates down to the earliest strata ^of 
psychic evolution always finds it, and the psycho-analyses con- 
serve these lost stages of development in which these patients 
have been arrested and which are magnified. Thus the long 
catalogue of errors that uninstructed youth sometimes go 
through touching sex and reproduction are not only pathetic, 
but they are instructive as furnishing the key to many of the 
perversions in this domain. These latter are so manifold that 
the vast body of clinical literature now in evidence seems to 
compel us to the conclusion that there is no act or object that 
has not in it some individual or race phallic significance or 
been sexually erethic. All the sex aberrations are now pretty 
well explained by their genesis, in some stage of which they 
all arise by arrest and magnification which, when traced to its 
source, is found due to an overstress of some one instrument 
in the sex symphony or an arrest at some one of the many 
phases that not only abnormally but probably normally must 
precede full maturity. All these facts certainly teach us that 
this vital department of human life is more or less disorgan- 
ized or at least threatened with decadence and needs special 
attention. 

There are very many children, having learned that babies 
emerge from orifices of the parental body, who build up elab- 
orate and fantastic theories that they come from the mouth, 
ears, nose, etc., in ways that seem to adult common sense like 
the systematized delusions of certain paranoiacs. Another 
group of weird theories centers in the question of how the 
mother gets the baby ; and here cluster another felted or plank- 
tonlike mass of foolish speculations : by eating certain food, by 
prayer, washing, wishing, certain exercises, regimen, visiting 
certain places, performing certain religious ceremonials. Al- 
most numberless are the popular ideas still found among the 
lowest savages concerning the immaculate conception ; and not 
a few of these have their recrudescence in the children of 
to-day. Then comes the long labor of soul to find out just 
what the father does and what paternity means. 

Strange things occur in the soul during this ferment. 
Sweet and innocent young maidens spin reveries that their 



452 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

father may have been some other man — a great prince maybe 
— and that the fathers of their brothers and sisters were still 
other noble personages, with no thought of wHat this would 
imply as to their mother's character or conduct. Indeed, the 
whole psychology of sex is full of flaring absurdities, contra- 
dictions, and partial views now filling the whole horizon of 
consciousness and then alternating to an opposite standpoint 
as the old one is abandoned. There are feelings that are in- 
sistent; and then comes a psychic ebb, and the contradictory 
mood becomes supreme. Here resolutions are frequent and 
made with all kinds of solemn vows but they are most fragile. 
Insights for the moment most satisfying are in another aban- 
doned with aversion. No instinct is so little in need of instruc- 
tion in regard to pragmatic essentials, but none is so blind and 
aberrant in all else. In no domain is infraction of convention 
so seriously punished ; yet perhaps in no field does sin and vice 
so abound. Hence, tension due to impulse on the one hand, 
and to restraint and repression on the other, is so great. Just 
here lies the strain. 

As a result of such oppositions arises another psychic 
peculiarity found nowhere else to such a degree: viz., the 
effective submergence of experience. With every step in ad- 
vance, both in insight and information, something, and per- 
haps much, has to be utterly tabooed, things which society will 
not tolerate and which must remain absolutely unspoken to 
one's nearest and dearest friends. Thus much that has been in 
the very focus of attention and interest is evicted, and the 
psyche burrows and buries its own dead. Thus, an unwelcome 
content of mind is forbidden, is not reverted to, is soon sub- 
merged and forgotten almost as completely as if it had never 
been ; only in rare cases can it be resuscitated in some hypnoid 
state in order to vicariate in consciousness for a neurosis which 
its suppression caused. Having found the way and the truth, 
the abortive ways are barred. And just so the race at the 
stage of some prehistoric renaissance carefully scoured away 
all the traces it could of the old phallic religions that once 
covered the earth and were the apperception organs that gave 
sex to everything and interpreted all phenomena sexually. It 
is the benign influence of modesty and shame that conceals 
and seeks to obliterate. Thus, children in the very earliest 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 453 

teens have already forgotten very much here; and a good deal 
of suppressed knowledge that they once treasured has slowly 
been consigned to oblivion. ^ 

I often see girls of circa twelve who go about very r 
quietly, seem demure and often absent-minded, with spells of 
relative indifference to things once of great interest to them, 
who are silent in the presence of adults and yet gravitate to- 
ward them for companionship in these moods. They are un- 
responsive, rather imperturbable, often apparently lolling, 
listless, self-centered, poised, rather repellent of confidences 
and approaches as if on their guard against self-betrayal. 
They have no suspicion of what is going on in their souls; | 
though so absorbing is it that there is no part of the soul left I 
to look on with or to remember with. But analyses and J 
neuroses betray this triply guarded secret : they are brooding / 
over great biological questions of the origin of life, sex, death,/ 
their own relations to their parents and brothers, musing 
about marriage, about how to get at the truth to both escape 
and to penetrate the mesh of conventional lies of every sort 
culminating with those of sex with which they are encom- 
passed. What and whom can they actually trust? What is 
really and truly so, " sure as you live," " with your hand on 
your heart," " by the sign of the cross " ? How shall they 
know the truth of the truth, wdiat they most of all want to 
learn; and how can they do so without asking and being put 
to shame, or without seeming ignorant when, in fact, perhaps 
all assume that they do know ? They ought and perhaps do 
sometimes blush in secret to think of these things ; but they 
cannot escape the insistent questionings. How can their 
elders be so blithe and cheery if the world is as they are be- 
ginning to divine it? How they muse on certain half-inci- 
dental words or allusions let fall by the grown-ups, which 
answer perhaps some of their mute longings ; while all the 
rest of the wiser talk washes over them unnoted and leaving 
no trace! These pregnant suggestions are pondered in the 
heart ; and thus the girl slowly orients her way to wisdom by 
them, constantly casting old knowledge once thought precious . 
as rubbish to the void. She will reach the goal in the end; but I 
how vastly much might have been saved her by a little plain, / 
sane teaching betimes? And how this long stage, which is' 



454 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

throughout so very vulnerable to shock, might have been 
shortened and facilitated ! - 

Whether they are saved to virtue or lost to vice often de- 
pends upon their getting or failing to get the knowledge their 
whole souls are consciously or unconsciously seeking. 

" Friihlings Erwachen," by Wedekind (translated by F. J. Zieg- 
ler) is a dramatically clumsy attempt to present the tragedy of ado- 
lescence for girls who " did not know." The action represents the 
very crisis of puberty, utterly ignorant, utterly naive, and after the 
tragic results the girl, who dies, dismalizes her mother's life by re- 
proaching her that she had not been told. G. Compayre ^ commenting 
on this thinks with Kant, that sex instruction should largely be an 
object of public and social training, and so highly commends the 
French league of doctors and families, and the society for moral 
prophylaxis. Both lay great stress upon what is designated by the 
Anglo-Saxon term, self-control. 

Thus, children's minds, in fact, are very fertile as well as 
active here, and they very often develop ideas which later cause 
great trouble. Often strong natures come into more or less 
open rebellion against parents' authority on other matters on 
account of concealment or deception here. Some torture 
themselves in secret and devise the most grotesque and absurd 
explanations, which they whisper to each other with some sense 
of shame and guilt, and this lays the foundations for regard- 
ing these matters as repulsive and perhaps nauseating later. 
These infantile theories ought to be systematically collected 
and evaluated. Nearly all lose their way for a time, at least, 
and wander often with great risk and waste of energy before 
they learn the simple right way of nature. Here very many 
parents and writ'^rs are exceedingly clumsy and ignorant. 
Freud highly commends Emma Eckstein in " Die Sexualfrage 
in der Erziehung des Kindes," 1904. Most parents reserve 
explanation till the latest moment, and then give it in solemn 
words that are themselves a little misleading, so that instead 
of learning all as they wish to children must have recourse to 
forbidden ways. Thought is very often very greatly intimi- 
dated in this way. One little boy was overheard saying to his 
younger sister, " How can you imagine the stork brings chil- 

^Les Adolescents au Theatre et I'Education de la Puberty. L'Educateur 
Moderne, 1909, vol. 4, pp. 3-14. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 455 

dren when you know that man is a mammal? Do you think 
the stork brings their children to other mammals?" Expla- 
nations should certainly be given before ten or before children 
leave the Volksschule, and still further explanation should be 
connected with confirmation. The French are now substitut- 
ing for the catechism an elementary book which introduces 
the child into civic life but, strange to say, there is a great 
gap here. The clergy will never recognize the close relation 
of man to animals because they are always thinking that man 
has an immortal soul and that unless he is as widely differ- 
entiated as possible from brutes the foundations of moral train- 
ing cannot be properly laid. There ought to be a rather fun- 
damental reform in this respect. 

A. Moll/ another of the most eminent experts in this field, says 
that all riiust realize that children can no longer hf. brought up in 
ignorance of sex matters, which filter in upon their minds through 
very many and very often extremely obnoxious and suggestive ways. 
He blames religious teachers for not doing their duty. He thinks that 
under conditions of modern life the somatic signs of puberty afford 
no reliable indication of whether or not the intelligence has reached 
this period, which it often does long before it should. He would 
trace botanical and zoological processes and wisely says that the 
child's questions are the very best guide for all the stages and dates, 
deploring the fact that many who wish to teach these subjects are 
densely ignorant and some are spreading noxious errors. 

Sexual Eclaircissement for Delicate Older Girls. — The evi- 
dence is now overwhelming that sexual eclaircissement is an 
extremely critical matter for modern girls of nervous di- 
athesis. The first knowledge of parturition and still more of 
the act of fecundation is liable to come to them as a shock that 
causes intense disgust and aversion. To delicate girls in the 
earliest teens the physical relation of the sexes often seems 
almost incredibly bestial and not infrequently fills them not 
only with disenchantment, but with positive repugnance to- 
ward the opposite sex. All their instincts and previous 
training in modesty and shame seem outraged and some girls 
in our returns when reluctantly convinced, show abatement 
of attachment for their own fathers for a time and sometimes 

^ Sexuelle Erziehung. Zeits. fiir pad. Psy., Path, und Hygiene, 1908, vol. 10, 
pp. 145-216. 



456 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

express pathetic sympathy for their mothers as victims of 
brutahty. Full eclair cisscinent may occupy a number of years ^ 
and with some it is a very serious matter to effect complete 
reconciliation with the facts of life, and a few iTever achieve 
thereafter complete affirmation of the will to live, or find ,it^ 
hard to accept things as they are. My own data incline me 
to agree with Freud and his followers that psycho-sexual trau- 
mata may become the cause of very grave disorders later, 
e\'en if they are not always quite so unconscious, so general,^ 
or so early as he thinks. He lays stress upon the nervous 
stiain due to the forced association of sex with repulsive 
excremental processes; but this would surely be greatest if it 
came early. On no subject, perhaps even religion, is men- 
tal equilibrium so likely to be upset, if knowledge is given 
before the mind is ripe for the mental digestion that is neces- 
sary. The sudden, accidental envisagement by exceptional 
experiences or too pragmatic and early descriptions may read- 
ily become the submerged nucleus of grave perturbances ; and., 
here our questionnaire returns suggest to me a source of dis- 
turbance which I think not adequately described or even 
recognized by the Freudians or others, as follows : Many of 
the psychic prelusions of sex just before the age of first men- 
struation are not at all associated in the girl's mind with 
specific anatomical or functional changes. They are simply 
rich and strong new tides of sentiment. The other sex acquires 
new interest though perhaps more at a distance. Love is ideal- 
ized in purity, heroism, romance, and suffuses life with a 
golden haze. If it focuses in a person, it is innocent ; and 
even if there are occasional acts of endearment, they are chaste 
and immaculate. There is reverie, dreamery, perhaps of ulti- 
mate mating with some paragon of masculine virtue, fancied 
pictures of beauty, adornment, devotion, and service. Every 
religious feeling and aspiration is greatly enhanced and the 
soul is on tiptoe of faith, expectation, desire to embody 
every physical, mental, and moral attribute of womanhood and 
of the race in one's own personality. Now, when into this 
ecstatic paradisaical state, the crass, brutal facts of sex are 

^ See a rather typical and not abnormal case in E. Stiehl's Eine Mutterpflicht. 
Seemann, Leipzig, 1902, 46 p. Also H. Fiirth's Die geschlechtliche Aufklarung 
in Haus und in Schule. Frauen-Rundschau, Leipzig, n. d., 44 p. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 457 

suddenly forced by accident or by the advances of a gross 
lover, or even by something read or told by some elder friend, 
it may be with the pedagogical passion that all must know it, 
this sometimes comes with effects that may almost be described i^ 
as a psychic outrage of a vestal or nun. There are tears, 
lacerations as the heart revolts toward men, resolutions it may 
be of perpetual celibacy and disenchantment with life gener- 
ally. Many now feel at least momentary impulsion to make 
a great renunciation. Love has perhaps begun to bourgeon, 
even if all unconsciously, and it is now reversed or general- 
ized it may be toward philanthropy, and there is a sense of be- 
ing blighted and all this goes on with only partial consciousness 
of it. This, as abundant records show, is for some girls in the 
teens who are exotically sensitive by birth and overrefined by 
nurture, almost like the apparition of a mocking, horned, 
hoofed and tailed devil in Eden. Healthful souls would per- 
haps in time digest almost any such experience and even 
delicate ones would do so, if insight came gradually without 
too much shock. Weakly girls, however, may now acquire a 
coital or parturition phobia that, opposed as it is to all the 
deep instincts of a woman's nature for mating and maternity, 
precipitates internal conflicts that pervade both the conscious 
and the unconscious spheres of life and involve incalculable 
waste and sometimes permanent disequilibration. Thus for 
many a slender girl, perhaps a trifle aneemic, who has not 
achieved a full and complete development, internal and ex- 
ternal, who suffers and who has general nervousness of what- 
ever kind and cause, is very prone to center the sphere of 
those functions connected with the transmission of life and 
from that as a focus it irradiates on occasion into the spheres 
of nutrition, circulation, respiration, or mentation, may cause 
some new somnambulic phenomena, dissociation, convulsions, 
contractures, anaesthesias, fundamental paralysis, fixed ideas, 
stigmata, tics of many kinds, etc. Happily the weaklings who 
show these extremes are still relatively few, although their 
proportion seems to be steadily increasing. 

Dr. M. A. Cleaves ^ says that young girls and women 

^ Education in Sexual Hygiene for Young Working Women. Charities and the 
Commons, 1906, vol. 15, pp. 721-724. See also Dr. F. C. Valentine: Education 
in Sexual Subjects. N. Y. Medical Journal, 1906, vol. 83, pp. 276-278. Also 



45S EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

shrink from all discussion of such matters, and as a result 
their ignorance and credulity make them easy victims. They 
little suspect the risk to which they commit themselves. Young 
working women are generally strong enough to face the truth 
and, if so, it should be taught without bated breath, biologic- 
ally, and as one of the most interesting, beautiful, and sacred 
of things. The bare facts are never enough.^ Some business 
firms employing many girls also employ one or more physi- 
cians to make themselves gratuitously serviceable. Women's 
clubs should study this problem. Assuming that a new sex 
ethics may impend it must come very slow and the darker side 
of sexuality, which may well try the nerve of an expert, should 
not be overstressed. Nowhere is greater tact and caution 
necessary. From this we can see that sex pedagogy with 
slightly premature, delicate girls is often a very grave problem, 
quite distinct from that for thoroughly healthful ones and for 
all the sex radically different from that which boys require. 
Nature doubtless indicates that the period of idealism should 
have its fling unperturbed by all that seems gross. Pragma- 
tists on the other hand, urge that the fleshly facts be taught 
first before puberty and that they have the right of way, even 
if the wings of the later idealism are clipped a little, and that 
unbridled romance is dangerous because of the perils of the 
rude awakening to which it may be subjected. Here, how- 
ever, we are hard up against the limits of present knowledge 
and perhaps the best that can be said is that each girl should 
be a problem by herself. Most, however, do and will now learn 
the worst before puberty and will yet idealize after it comes 
and associate and coordinate between the two in some way 
later as best they may. Thus, the task of the instructor, 
whether parent or teacher, is to accept the inevitable situation 
and see that knowledge acquired is sound and not perverse, 



Dr. A. H. Smith: The Prophylactic Value of Normal Marriage. Medical News, 
1905, vol. 87, pp. 1163-1165. Also F. Griffith: Observations Upon the Protective 
Value of the Inspection of Public Women as Carried Out in Paris. Medical Record, 
N. Y., 1904, vol. 65, pp. 651-652. Also H. A. Brann: Social Prophylaxis and the 
Church. Medical News, 1905, vol. 87, p. 74. 

' To my mind the public pamphlet of the Indianapolis society, " Sexology vs. the 
Sexual Plague," is too grossly material and shocking. We must not admit "yellow" 
methods here. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 459 

and be ready with personal aid whenever its need is seen or 
felt and for the rest to trust nature. 

H. G. Wells has even advocated a special law and censor- 
ship for all literature bearing upon this subject. H. North- 
cote ^ sees the higher aspect of this subject. I believe it is not 
now too much to say that a scientific knowledge of sex 
is absolutely necessary to understand certain fundamentals of 
Christianity and that the latter is to be greatly reenforced by 
the former. Our religion is at heart an expression of the 
passion for purity and righteousness and it will be indefinitely 
strengthened by every possible alliance with a true science of 
sex, and this in turn will shed a great deal of light upon 
practical matters. " The mighty idol Moloch, Lord of Baalim, 
before whom, victims were plunged into the torture of fires, 
a sex deity in phallic worship, was a lurid symbol of the 
dangers that beset the sexual life." The sense of the inherent 
sinfulness of this relation has been explained in very different 
ways by Westermarck, Letourneau, Ellis, Crawley, Tennant, 
C. A. Smith, and others. It is due to the fact of long-con- 
tinued and calamitous errors and excesses in this part of our 
nature to which the dumb instinct of the race that always says 
one thing while meaning another but is always inerrant when 
rightly interpreted, has reacted by developing the sense of 
shame. There is a marked trend in recent criticism both of 
the Old and New Testament to reveal sex meanings as often 
cardinal where they were formerly quite unsuspected, and 
even to judge of religions by the wisdom and effectiveness 
with which they regulate this relation. No topic is so hard to 
treat without exaggeration, pruriency, high colors. Northcote 
deserves great credit for his sanity in treating perversions, 
sex in art, its spiritualization, marriage, divorce, disease, neo- 
Malthusianism, the battle for chastity in the child and the 
adult in a religious sense. Most current methods of coping 
with the evils of sex seem to him as effective as to try to 
suppress a volcano by carting off some of its scoria. Legis- 
lation has hitherto been usually baffled even in its efforts to 
protect children. Hypnotism is not effective. Medical warn- 
ings, moral counsel and penalties may and no doubt do help 

' Christianity and Sex Problems. Davis, Philadelphia, 1906, 257 p. 



460 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

this evil that threatens civiHzation, but rehgion, which has 
been the chief agent in regulating it in the past, must be also 
looked to in the future. With girls even more than with men, / 
it is important to connect sex enlightenment with religion. '^ 
The deeper criticism penetrates into the inmost core of early 
Christianity and comes to understand the conscious or uncon- 
scious psychic motives that actuated it, the more it is seen that 
aspirations for righteousness on the one hand and the loath- 
ing of iniquity and sin on the other had their real meaning in 
ancient times and can be truly understood to-day only as re- 
actions from the morbid, gross and excessive sexuality that 
characterized the declining age of Rome, and the new aspi- 
rations for purity in this respect which made chastity one of 
the supreme virtues and created the celibate sects, and that 
made virginity the most adorable of all things. 

One of the most important factors in the problem of 
woman is how her periodicity has been regarded. Man has 
regarded her course as a badge of inferiority. He has turned 
from her, isolated her, called her unclean, thinking her for a 
time diseased and perhaps even infectious and sometimes en- 
forcing- fantastic regimen and taboos. She must withdraw, 
hide and feel humiliated. He did not understand that this 
was nature's inflorescence and not only marvelous and past 
his comprehension but essentially most interesting and beauti- 
ful, a process when normal to be proud and not ashamed of. 
The subjection of woman in so small measure consists in the 
fact that she has accepted this old ignorant view of her state 
and function from man. It will be a momentous step in her^ 
real inner emancipation when she fully realizes in her own : 
soul, of course without ostentation, that this function is due [ 
to superfluity and not to defect of vitality, that it is the germ ; 
of a new life knocking at a door not yet ready to admit it or 
rather it is a mimic rehearsal of the whole birth and deaths 
The first results of this knowledge and its complete realization 
will be that woman will accept and crave the whole of 
periodicity instead of maintaining her anxious concealment 
or repression of its symptoms and will regulate all her regimen 
and environment conformably to its norms. Young pubescent 
girls especially need to yield to nature with entire freedom, if 
not abandon. They often flush, turn pale, have moments of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 461 

confusion, yield perhaps to tears, certainly to inertia, are con- 
fused and uncertain. If boys are present, the old instinct of 
concealment makes them tense and yet more anxious, for were 
their state to be in the least suspected they would be utterly 
crushed with mortification. The result is that just those nervy 
girls who can least afford this strain, are most resolute that 
every day and all its duties shall be precisely like all others. 
Seasoned lady teachers have made light of it or taught that 
all the peculiar feelings of this state should be neglected as if 
a crude mind-cure might also obliterate them and it is thus so 
often with aching back or head, tired eyes, brains and muscles, 
girls try to be imperturbed and uniform through the entire 
month and thus grow exhausted and perhaps anaemic, keep on 
in class although by doing so they arrest mammary and pelvic 
development and invite brain fag, which is only the foretaste 
of the later fag of pelvic and anabolic function which will 
appear in much more formidable form later in pregnancy and 
lactation. If girls' daily school associations were only with 
girls, they would be understood, would take more advantage 
of the allowance of cuts and other exemptions. Every fully 
developed normal woman wishes to be alone and a law to her- 
self at times in a way that even husbands do not always under- 
stand. To ripen into the full maturity of perfect womanhood 
in the teens, in the daily companionship and competition of 
boys in class, hour by hour, weeks and months is difficult, rare, 
if not indeed entirely impossible. A haunting sense that the 
other sex must never suspect whatever betides, the constant 
effort a few days each month to conceal, the brutal gibes of 
callow schoolboys who often do suspect and remember and 
even note recurring absences, errors, bad lessons, etc., makes 
an atmosphere to which no girl should be exposed, and many 
who have been through it all, if not robbed of a little refine- 
ment and delicacy of sentiment, are more or less maimed in 
some of the manifold and early arrested or perverted last 
subtle stages of finished womanhood. Remarkable, indeed, if 
any such there be, who go through all these long and intricate 
processes of transformation under the eyes of our precocious 
American schoolboys unscathed, for it is one of the most try- 
ing ordeals which womanhood has ever been called to face 
in all her history. The entire history and tradition of her sex 



462 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

from savagery up points to segregation with periods of isola- 
tion from prying male eyes. That the strain is real and great 
in cases where it is unconscious is apparent from the fact that 
the system of adolescent girls is drawn upon for years in order 
to develop all the organs and functions involved in reproduc- 
tion which are many times larger, harder, and more uncertain, 
and require thus a far greater proportion of the total energy 
of the body than the corresponding parts and functions in the 
male. Not only sympathetic and spinal nerves but much more 
bram power and attention is absorbed by pelvic functions than 
is the case with man. Hence, if those who now argue that all 
kinds of mental stimulus tend to lower nutritive activities 
more in women than in men are right, it follows that the mere- 
ly intellectual in them should be held back rather than inces- 
santly prodded on as is done in co-education. Nature decrees 
that woman during all her fertile years shall be ever ready and 
recurrently begin to digest and deplete her blood and nerves 
for two. She can and must never during all her best years 
make it impossible for the very best that is in her metabolism, 
feelings, interest, will, thought, and life to be turned aside to 
the long and absorbing processes of gestation and nursing. 
Therefore, all other interests and every intellectual pursuit 
unrelated to these functions must of necessity for her be more 
or less provisional, for all not directly pertaining to mother- 
hood may be suspended and superseded, for maternity means 
physiologically vastly more than fatherhood and can never be 
so incidental. Nature demands that woman be always ready 
to discharge this great function and this should be the first 
law of her being, and mental training in other directions is 
forever secondary. It depletes the system, makes these proc- 
esses less vigorous and complete and when it does so works 
incalculable harm and loss. 

From this view we can see how merely mental acquisition 
may be very falsetto and unreal. Learning has many stages. 
Knowledge may be crammed in the memory and held ready 
to be reproduced verbally when called upon. In this stage it 
causes efifort and requires both conscious and unconscious 
strain. There is often worry lest it be not kept ever ready at 
call, and this anxiety prolonged after academic months and 
years consumes much energy. All learning which remains in 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 463 

this surface stage is a burden to carry, costly, manifest and 
showy though it be. Even if it is mechanized in rote it adds 
httle or nothing to the power of Hfe. Very different is the 
case of acquisitions that sink deeper and reconstruct conduct 
and make habits of Hfe and become not merely Kennen, but 
Konncn. This practical knowledge is no longer luggage to be 
carried but is transmuted into strength that carries, is no 
longer something apperceived but a part of the apperception 
organ. It often ceases to be conscious and examinable but 
sinks deep and regulates and reenforces the springs of action. 
Its training and power is not merely noetic. Such is what we 
put to work and use and such studies have zest and vitality, 
are contentful and not merely formal. 

Now girls tolerate and adjust to the former kind and stage 
of knowledge more readily than boys and, perhaps more than 
they know, their school curriculum remains unapplied. What 
they learn is farther from the things they most need to know 
and be and care most for. Their conscientiousness forbids 
revolt and their conventionality makes for complaisance, but 
because it is less vital it involves more nerve straining. It is 
not assimilated and so consumes instead of giving vigor. Thus 
till we demolish the inveterate conventionality of girls that 
makes them ready to accept what occupies only a secondary 
place in their interest so that they will turn as honestly from 
what they do not care for as boys do, school is liable to play 
havoc with both their nerves and their physical development 
and even their intellect and health. They will go on with their 
propensity to altruism, taking out from their system more 
than it can afford to lose. Instead of fitting primarily for self- 
support and trusting marriage and maternity if they come to 
take care of themselves, we should reverse this principle, and 
in addition to physical dimorphism each sex will be distin- 
guished psychologically more and more from the other. 

Self-abuse and Its Pedagogy. — Hard as it is to collect reli- 
able statistics upon this subject, this has been done by methods 
that seem trustworthy. These and other considerations to- 
gether seem to show that masturbation is very common among 
boys and young men and that very few vigorous and eager- 
minded youths have not at least at some time experimented 
with themselves in this way. Physicians have insisted over 



464 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and over again that no healthy male reaches the age of 
maturity without at least lapses into this habit. Often, if the 
extent of the evil has not been overestimated, its deleterious 
effects undoubtedly have been. It injures body and mind, 
however, perhaps less so than has often been represented. In 
certain definite respects it is worse than natural indulgence, 
viz., first, it can be resorted to at any time and^does not require 
the presence of another person; second, there is no repressive 
influence of expense; and third, it distinctly tends to isolate 
and divorce the function from related processes that always 
should go with it, such as the normal preliminaries of court- 
ship or even capture, gradual approach, showing off, and the 
general arousement of the entire psychophysic organism. 
There is a close bond between this habit and degeneracy, each 
Increasing the other. It undoubtedly makes directly for arrest 
before complete maturity. It gravely injures self-respect, 
brings a feeling of worthlessness, weakness, and malaise. It is 
incompatible with athleticism and all forms of keen, eager 
mentality or even artistic power. One of its worst results 
is that at a certain point the mechanism becomes automatic in 
nocturnal and spontaneous emissions, so that the system is 
drained of its vitality and this directly tends to bring a sense of 
repression and even despair that sometimes results in suicide. 
I have often had to act as father-confessor to students who 
had resorted to many kinds of devices, had been the victims 
of extortionate quacks, but all in vain, and had come to feel 
themselves lost forever, body and soul. Here alone in human 
experience all the litany of total depravity and of the unpar- 
donable sin seems to be literally true. The young man in this 
state feels himself helpless in the grasp of a higher malign 
power. It is idle to discuss what proportion of these dire re- 
sults is due to psychic causes like fear and to physiological 
effects. It is a very salient, painful and yet significant fact 
that the fear of being incapacitated for future parenthood is 
one of the very most poignant of all the psycJialgias to which 
youth is subject. Many indulge in the habit for a season and 
have strength of will enough to break off ; while others always 
resolve with all their might in the trough of the wave of ten- 
sion, and while at its crest all their good resolutions are swept 
away like foam. All this has brought these experiences into 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 



465 



very close relations with certain types of religiosity of which 
they are the key. Often the obsessions that rest upon the 
victims of this vice are so persistent that after hours of asser- 
tion, argumentation, encouragement, and an array of authori- 
ties, very little impression is made toward lightening the sense 
of impending doom ; and it is sometimes very hard, and oc- 
casionally impossible, to restore their lost manhood, courage, 
and buoyancy to these youth. 

Here it is that the results of ignorance are most disastrous. 
The statement of the simple fact that all healthy men occa- 
sionally have nocturnal experiences and that these are about 
as inseparable from the male as her periodicity is from the 
woman has often of itself brought great relief and spoken 
peace to poor creatures who did not know it. Here, if vice 
has slain its thousands, fear has slain its ten thousands; and 
sometimes these most blighting fears are found to be happily 
without any reasonable basis — the youth were normal but did 
not know this simple law of their being. 

Nocturnal experiences have their own very interesting law. 
L. Gualino ^ thinks erotic dreams and emission, which explain 
many legends of incubi and succuhcc, are the surest sign of 
puberty. Like Marro, he obtained data from one hundred 
males as follows : 



Age. 



13- 
14. 

15- 
16. 

17- 
18. 



Per Cents. 


Marro. 


GuaJino. 




7% 


24% 


33% 


48% 


59% 


65% 


84% 


86% 


97% 


92% 


100% 


100% 





Thus, by the age of seventeen or eighteen, it appears that 
practically all Italians have had such dreams. These figures 
correspond in a general way to Marro's test of puberty by the 
growth of hair. The first seminal pollutions are vesicular 



^ II Sogno erotico nell' Uomo normale. 
vol. 3, pp. 47-63- 
31 



Rivisla di Psicologia, etc., 1907, 



466 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

secretions without spermatozoa, and twenty-seven per cent are 
preceded by perhaps violent tumescence and vague feehngs of 
tenderness toward the other sex, as noted by Wundt, Forel, etc. 
No personal sex experience is necessary to awaken these 
dreams. It may thus often be purely sttavistic, and the new- 
born instincts with their brain centers and peripheral organs, 
function spontaneously while the feelings, which have before 
been vague and not understood, become suddenly conscious, 
definite, and objective. As to the content of these dreams, the 
images from various senses of women are common; while to 
seventy-one per cent, they were ugly or even monstrous, per- 
haps a mother, an animal, etc. These images often transform 
themselves to inanimate things — a hat, a boat, a musical in- 
strument, etc. At first, the act is often public, though usually 
uninduced by others, and in seventy-three per cent is rapid 
and violent. The emotional state is anxious, fearsome, desir- 
ous, etc., but with age the imagined female becomes less hate- 
ful, though she is still rarely known, and the phenomena of 
exhaustion and reaction are less marked. If such experiences 
are frequent, the psychophysic tension is less, the prelimina- 
ries to the consummation are prolonged, the place becomes more 
fit, etc. Erotic dreams tend to assimilate themselves to wak- 
ing states, and in that respect are different from other dreams. 
The former are far more frequent, intense, and more recallable 
than other varieties of dreams. There is often a periodicity 
in them which usually disappears after marriage. They are 
accompanied by caresses and by excitement with restraint, 
but are also increased as by a kind of momentum in the post- 
coital period. They may occur in cases of psychic, but not of 
physiological, impotence. Gualino confirms the conclusions of 
the important studies of Sanctis and Maury that the habit of 
waking up and immediately recording dreams modifies their 
content. 

That normal, virtuous, unmarried young men have sexual 
periodicity can no longer be doubted. It is seen in various 
studies of savages, in careful observations of dream and other 
nocturnal experiences, in certain psychic alterative types of 
mental alienation, and from our own collection of data from 
normal subjects. The form and frequency of this curve is 
subject to great individual variations, and it is superposed 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 467 

upon a larger seasonal curve. So far as we are able to infer 
from these premises, the following seems to be a typical 
normal cycle : 

1. The youth feels a subtle and languid sadness and sense 
of inadequacy stealing over him. He may or may not connect 
this with specific instances of failure or disappointment. There 
is so much to do and such heights to attain that his effort 
seems vain or at least inadequate ; what he could and ought to 
strive for seems beyond his powers ; wishes and ideals take on 
a rather definite shape, but his ambitions are unrealizable; 
some are more, some less, depressed; but life is felt to be too 
much or too hard for them; a few weaklings seem to lack 
the power to react, and break away from the normal rhythm 
and pass over to chronic despair and possibly suicide, or at 
least thoughts of it, which who has not had? For many suc- 
cess hardly seems worth the cost ; the intellect is clear but the 
will is weak; more commonly this is a rather exquisite and 
sweet melancholia that is rather toyed with than taken very 
seriously; it may be keenly felt in secret, or it may seem far 
greater than it is by a kind of half-conscious affectation which 
loves to flirt with pessimistic moods; it may be a touch, but 
not much, of the Hamlet psychosis; it may be restless or 
quiet and contemplative ; it inclines some to meditation and to 
solitude; it often seems like an ebb of the vital tide. 

2. Slowly, usually in a few days, courage rises and a mood 
to do and dare supervenes ; work is easier and activity is more 
effective ; things are attempted with resolution and we accom- 
plish things, mental or physical, that had seemed impossible; 
new, high purposes are formed and steps taken toward their 
execution; there is augmented motor tension; sleep is a little 
less; appetite keener; hardship and exposure become more at- 
tractive and difficulties fade. In some the unrest is liable to 
become fever; if there is anxiety, it is a spur and not a de- 
terrent; second breath and brain erethism are more liable and 
the higher powers of man seem attainable; the pace of labor 
is rapid and fatigue may be almost forgotten; the spirits are 
aggressive, perhaps almost defiant; the disposition of Long- 
fellow's " Excelsior " is on ; the pulse beats higher, life throbs, 
and the soul is dauntless; very likely blood pressure is in- 
creased and metabolism more rapid; the tide is rising toward 



468 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

its flood ; the lover is no longer disheartened but confident and 
hopeful and harder to be put off. This is the efficient stage 
in which man does his most and best. In unbalanced natures 
the excitement may take on maniacal features. 

3. After a time, more or less extended, of this reenforce- 
ment and acceleration, there comes a spontaneous, sexual, 
nocturnal crisis, usually with ecstatic dreams of the general 
type which punctuates all the virile life of man. The first 
of these experiences often marks something of an epoch in the 
private, secret life of the soul, exciting curiosity and giving a 
profound sense of exquisite realization and implanting a sense 
that there is something of inconceivable worth and value in 
the world, giving a glimpse of transcendent altitudes and pos- 
sibilities of satisfaction of all man's longing and desires some- 
where, somehow. 

4. Now come normally a few days of calm, poise, 
tranquillity, and satisfaction ; intensity of effort remits a little. 
It is good to be as well as to do ; nature, art, literature, music, 
work on us with a slightly more potent charm ; the demon of 
rush and hurry relaxes his hold; life is long and must be 
enjoyed as we forge and toil on; there is after all much time 
ahead, and we need not hurry so ; much can and will be done, 
but not everything by us; when we think of our limitations 
we are more easily reconciled to them ; there are other days to 
come and much must be left for others to do ; sleep is at its 
very best and rest as well as endeavor is also sweet ; we are 
now sanest, most philosophical, not easily perturbed, are judi- 
cial and can see and weigh two sides. But this stage, like the 
others, will not last and slowly beg'ins again an exquisite ennui 
that soon clouds into some of the hues of discontent and long- 
ing, nameless though its object be. Content is not so complete 
but something is wanting, though we cannot tell what ; but 
slowly desires grow definite. They are in pure natures not so 
sensuous as spiritual; ambition for achievement looms up in 
ideals and day dreams which go far beyond our ability; so 
that now again we are at the beginning of the first stage of 
the cycle from which we set out. 

Thus the impulse of virility beats, and the momentum of 
heredity advances, pauses, and intermits. .Through all the 
years of probation before marriage, we receive waves of 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 469 

energy from nature which we are to sublimate and convert 
into ever higher cuhural advances. Thus we ripen by control 
for effective fatherhood, when its consummate hour comes. 
These phases are very faint in many, are obscured by manifold 
outer influences, and often escape self-observation and that of 
our friends. Every kind of dissoluteness interferes with and 
denormalizes them. They are accelerated and overstressed in 
some; others are slowly arrested in some one phase, which 
grows habitual and may become a diathesis or give to charac- 
ter a permanent disposition. The changing gamut of moods 
is essential for full maturity, for it prevents stagnation and 
arrest, and makes the soul plastic and docile to every influence 
of development. Each phase has its own mental horizon and 
emotional experience, and thus the scope of the intellect, the 
range of association, the variety of feeling, is widened. Thus 
normal fatherhood ripens through its increasingly long novi- 
tiate in modern times, which was never so trying but never 
charged with such high potencies for complete maturity of 
body and soul. Individuation thus does its complete work 
and brings ripeness for genesis, in some sense its counterpart 
and antithesis. Now is the time for marriage for the turn of 
posterity has come. It is those who stand this long test suc- 
cessfully — and only those — that deserve and win in fullest 
measure the deep and abiding love of their mate, and merit all 
the respect and gratitude that children should owe to their 
parents. Eailure in this stage means abated mutual love be- 
tween parents themselves and between children and parents. 
No amount of personal kindness, wealth, exemption from toil, 
display, or social opportunities which husbands can provide 
their wives, can atone for the results of failure on their part 
in standing this severe initiation which modern life requires. 
To love is not to give gifts, neither is to receive them to be 
loved ; but both are cheap substitutes and palliatives. So, too, 
no care lavished upon infancy, childhood, and youth by fathers 
who seek by so doing to atone for not endowing their offspring 
with the maximum of the most ancient and precious form of 
wealth and worth, heredity, can make atonement. Those who 
fail in this preconceptional stage also forfeit thereby the chief 
claim of parents to the reverence, affection, and obedience of 
their children. The bitter and justifiable curses of the latter 



470 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

upon the fathers that begat them, which we see with increas- 
ing frequency in the world about us and in literary portrayals, 
are the most bitter of all invectives and the most soul-quaking 
of all imprecations. 

Blessings brighten as they take their flight, and along with 
race suicide we already see signs of a new idealization of 
motherhood which sometimes takes the form of almost rhap- 
sodical extravagance. " The true divinity of our day," says 
a German writer, " is the mother." God in the future is to be 
yet more our mother than our Father in Heaven, and even 
Protestantism must evolve some kind of a new Mariolatry of 
its own for the new coronation of motherhood. 

Careful alumni statistics from Harvard and Yale show 
that 250 years ago only two per cent of the graduates remained 
unmarried, while now nearly one fourth are unmarried at the 
age of forty-five. Most of the women our forefathers wedded 
were barely twenty-one. Sibley and Dexter show that the 
average number of children of Harvard and Yale graduates 
was nearly seven per husband and five per mother. Half were 
clergymen who married in the early twenties upon ordination, 
and with a salary of from two to five hundred dollars, and 
our foremothers have spun, woven, knit, baked, washed, 
ironed, embroidered, made butter and cheese. No wonder 
their mortality was great. Of the wives of 418 Yale gradu- 
ates before 1745, thirty-three died at twenty-five or under, 
fifty-five at thirty-five or under, and fifty-nine at forty-five or 
under. Forty per cent died before they were fifty, leaving on 
an average four and a half children each. If the wife died, 
the father must marry again to have aid in rearing his family, 
and it sometimes took a second and even a third wife to bring 
up the children of the first, to which number she often added 
her own. Remarriage was almost universal and was almost 
regarded as a religious obligation. No wonder these women 
often suffered from long and painful diseases, with medical 
aid sparse and incompetent, with thin shoes and the tight 
lacings common in those days. The fact that in the exercise 
of the holy office of motherhood she often had to face the grim 
chance of death under these hard conditions, tended to reen- 
force her natural religious instincts and to keep her close to 
the Divine Source of strength. While in Puritan days, men 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 47i 

quarreled about theology and formulated creeds and built 
churches, piety true and undefiled found its sanctuary in the 
inmost heart of woman. The unfathomable sense of depend- 
ence in which religion has its psychic root is strong in her soul, 
which has always been cramped and repressed, subject to 
pathetic disappointments, and this inclines her to seek reli- 
gious consolation and communion. Where else could she turn 
save to God, where else hope for reward save in Heaven, 
where else feel at home and at rest from incessant care save 
in the church? The transcendental world is always inversely 
as this, and it is no small meed of praise for our Puritan 
mothers that they learned how to extract the comforts of true 
religion from the crabbed creeds and long doctrinal sermons of 
their day. One of the most widely read booklets bore the 
significant title, " Crumbs of Comfort for Mothers," and in a 
collection of old Bibles and hymn books I find many a favorite 
page tear-stained, and still more underscored and written 
through with cross references, in some woman's hand. In the 
lives of some clergymen of that day, we find, too, that he was 
sustained, guided in his choice and perhaps even in his treat- 
ment of his subjects, and had his courage reenforced, by some 
high-minded woman of his flock. These foremothers often 
kept school at home every evening. They left not a few jour- 
nals and diaries. The New England Primer was a family 
book. The girls were taught to weave, spin both wool and 
flax, to make palm-leaf hats, embroider, quilt, dip candles, 
and were told of the medicinal purposes of a score or two of 
plants. Some of them educated themselves far beyond the 
school. Altogether, therefore, the Puritan New England 
mother, so far as we can form an adequate image of what she 
was and did, was a majestic as well as a pathetic figure. Now, 
no social class is so sterile as the educated who should send 
forth the best they breed. 

Of all the indirect means of controlling and normalizing 
sex, first, the ideals of physical perfection, training, body keep- 
ing, health, lead. A young man with a ruddy cheek, clear eye, 
confident, erect carriage, fond of exercise, outdoors and afield, 
delighting in competition involving victory and fatigue, am- 
bitious to be a splendid animal, with a strong, flexible voice, 
a natural piety, regular sleeping habits, hearty, free, open in 



472 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

manners, in love with the good old Turners' ideas, frisch, frei, 
frohlich, fromm, with a laudable passion to excel, with a love 
of rhythmic movements of great variety and vigor which may 
count so much to cadence the soul to virtue and preform it to 
religion — about such a young man there is usually nothing 
that is wrong in secret. It is these things in which those who 
are sexually unhealthy are crippled, and into this joy of life 
those who know much of Venusberg can never enter. Thus 
every introduction of a motor element in place of the old 
sedentary training makes for chastity. 

Second, the intelligence of young people is normally very 
keen, their curiosity alert, their minds sprouting and teeming 
with eager spontaneous interest, grasping out for new facts, 
trying new-found powers of reason, ambitious for all kinds of 
summits like the hero of Longfellow's " Excelsior," having 
spells of amazingly rapid growth, crises of perseverance and 
activity, when now the soul, now the body, shoot ahead by 
leaps and bounds, the former in a rapid, intuitive way possible 
only for youth. Now every intellectual interest is also a seda- 
tive or an alterative of sex on its sensuous side. From this 
follows a converse truth of the gravest import, viz., merely 
formal school topics, dull teaching, listless routine, zestless 
attention, are themselves incentives to passion, which always 
presses for entrance into unoccupied minds and moments, so 
that wherever there are unused functions, there is danger. 
Sitting without mental interest invites the devil. On the other 
hand, for the virtuous the deeds and words of great men are 
never so inspiring, while the dry-as-dust teachers and courses 
are co-respondents with the lusty blood of youth in the indict- 
ment of sexual errors now brought against high-school pupils 
and college students. It is a hard thing to arouse strong and 
deep intellectual interests in young men at this age, and it is 
because of the dangers where this is not done that we must 
base one of the strongest arguments for making education 
more industrial, occupational, or vocational. 

Third, puberty is the birthday of the feelings and emotions, 
which are the oldest and most dominant parts of the soul, that 
really rule our lives even, and have most to do in making us 
sane or insane. Let me repeat that the young must tingle and 
crepitate with sentiment, and feeling is at no time quite so 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 473 

necessary as during the teens. If there are no worthy excitants 
or causes, the young are very Hable to turn to grosser forms 
of pleasure; hence every glow of even athletic interest, every 
thrill aroused by heroism, every faint pulse of religious ad- 
miration, takes just so much from the potential energy of 
passion by giving it a kinetic equivalent on a higher plane. 
One of the surest effects of overindulgence of passion, on the 
other hand, is that the heart grows stale, there is abatement of 
the lust of life, a touch of cynicism, indifference, a dampening 
of the faculty of admiration, a feeling that there is after all 
hardly anything in the world really worth heroic endeavor or 
self-denial, a nil admirare pose toward great questions and in- 
terests, a touch of incapacity for genuine enthusiasm, and in 
place of heartiness and high Geniilt and esprit there slowly 
supervenes some form of fastidiousness, which is always a bad 
sign. The young man coddles and nurses his body or his 
whims, develops affectations and perhaps idiosyncrasies, may 
become overfinicky in dress or even cleanliness, for there is 
such a thing as overimmaculateness in these respects. Such 
things even in collegians are often the first harbingers of the 
slight, faint symptoms of dementia prcecox, which in so many 
cases are found among those who have freaky, faddish veins 
of excellence and perhaps pass for geniuses that have just 
failed to arrive. In most bachelor clubs we find such types. 
The world is full of laggards who have not quite attained full 
maturity or virility, who are not mattoids, rowdies, vagabonds, 
dullards, hoodlums, or young leaguers but nevertheless have 
not finished their adolescence but have been checked. They 
have had enthusiasms but perhaps these have been suddenly 
lost. There have been great promises but they have been 
dropped into humble situations. Only an expert alienist 
would detect the germs of dementia, which have never fully 
developed. Adolescence is a thing of many stages and arrest is 
liable at any one of them. Some parts may be disproportion- 
ately developed because cohesion and psychic unity are not 
attained. The world is thus full of those who have stopped at 
every stage of this toilsome, devious and complex way up- 
ward, who have disappointed their friends, grown hlase. 
Some of them doubtless are found among the 269 Prussian 
students who between the years of 1885 and 1889 committed 



474 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

suicide. They may not have overt symptoms and lack all the 
paradigms of premature decay, but they have not fully matured 
or they have matured prematurely. 

As to late marriages, long ago Galton show^ed that even in 
fertile England, if women did not marry before twenty-seven 
or eight, the nation would die out because there are not enough 
children born of mothers over this age to keep up the popula- 
tion. In this country, had we sufficient statistics, this age 
would doubtless be found to be lower, for as fertility declines 
in any class, marriage must be progressively earlier in order 
to insure that each generation be as numerous as that which 
preceded it, while it must be yet earlier if population is to 
increase. Tested either by the number and frequency or by 
the viability of offspring, the early or middle twenties are the 
golden age for effective motherhood. Special studies seem to 
indicate that if either parent is over the age of maximal effi- 
ciency in fecundity, the interests of posterity require that the 
other parent should be a little under age, so that for a number 
of years the total age of both parents should not be much 
above sixty to maintain the highest rate. Some think that 
those born of too young parents are prone to attain the com- 
pletest maturity, and it is probably more certain that children 
of too old parents tend to mature precociously and perhaps to 
show early signs of caducity. Again, the late maturing classes 
produce but about three generations per century so that their 
offspring, even if as numerous, would eventually be snowed 
under by that of classes that produce four generations per 
century. Within marriage the " one-child " system, or even 
the " two-child " system is condemned and found wanting 
because only children are, on the average, distinctly inferior 
to those with several brothers and sisters. It is therefore 
pathetic to find so many parents, especially mothers who are 
rather delicate, who strive by lavishing excessive care upon 
their one or two rather feeble offspring to atone for the faults 
of nature by nurture. Only the complete mother is, the com- 
plete woman and the complete father the complete man. Ter- 
tullian said, " The soul is restless till it finds rest in God " ; 
so the soul of woman is restless till it finds the fulfillment of 
its deepest desires in motherhood. Is there anywhere a normal 
woman of thirty-five or forty, famous though she be, who 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 475 

would not in her heart prefer home, husband, and children 
above all things the world has offered? The wife enters, but 
only the mother graduates from the great college of life. 
Nature has no more magnificent processional than the gradual 
blossoming of wifely into motherly love. Without this 
womanhood is unfinished. Compared with this, culture, 
society, charities, suffrage, occupations, rights, are only con- 
solation prizes or at least secondary and more or less diver- 
sionary choices, sought often all the more eagerly because of a 
hungry void in the heart. For those denied the supreme goal 
of womanhood it is well that these placebos and nepenthes 
are at hand. The deepest instinct, therefore, of every true 
woman soul is to transmit life, and her profoundest and 
most inconsolable woe is the prospect of a childless old age 
and death. Her soul is more protensive than man's and the 
desire for personal immortality and that for posterity sustain 
and vicariate for each other, all of which, of course, is in 
changed terms and proportions also for men. 

On the other hand, there are women that seem made rather for 
gratification than for procreation. They are not built for mother- 
hood. Their figures are those of the fashion plates, and such could 
not bear, nurse, or rear healthy children. They long for adoration 
and conquest; their whole character and conduct is adapted to win 
rather than to hold man's affection. If they marry, they drop at 
once all the artifice which has constituted most of their lives ; and 
to their husbands at least they appear in their true nature. They 
often crave and demand about every indulgence and service. Their 
accomplishments do not include home-making; perhaps they palpitate 
with a sense of their rights but of their duties they know and feel 
nothing; responsibility irks them. Their love for their husbands 
does not persist like that of Perdita's in wanting them to be the 
fathers of their children; but to some of them the mere idea of 
childbearing becomes almost a morbid phobia. Their part in the 
partnership of wedlock is at most to hold and advance their own and 
their husband's social position. If they are vital enough to love phys- 
ically, it is for self pleasure and not for posterity; and they usually 
know the theory and practice of the neo-Malthusianism of prevention. 
The husband of such a woman is at best the privileged lover rather 
than her ideal of a father. She may, if fervid, illustrate Kipling's 
Vampire and sap the vitality of her spouse and bring him to prema- 
ture senescence ; or, if she be or grow frigid, he must be content if he 
can admire her taste in dress, her social successes, the brilliancy of 
her intellect, perhaps her delicacy, exquisite nervous sensibility, or 
any other of these wretched substitutes which women of this type 



476 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

offer their spouses in place of true wifely love with plenty of 
maternalism in it. Again, her fancy may be of the roaming rather 
than of the homing type, and she may delight in fascinating other 
men, which such women who have so little to offer often know 
superbly well how to do, and leave her mate to either grow indiffer- 
ent and to follow her example or, if the poor wretch really loves 
her, to eat his heart out with jealousy and fall a victim in the end 
to scandal and the lawyers. 

The problem is how and why such types exist in civilized society 
when they are hardly found among primitive races. The question is 
as interesting intellectually as it is sad. Are they thenlselves prod- 
ucts of decadent love, and has man thus, by some law of nature not 
yet fathomed, tended to provide his own sex with women who are 
meant for passion and not fit to be wives and mothers? Because 
man indulges himself more than is needful for offspring, does the 
great Biologos provide him with these specimens of the other sex 
as the cloaca of his superfluous passion, making them sterile in the 
interests of the race ? Surely prostitution is not inherent in the 
economy of nature ; or does she cunningly fashion this type to attract 
men of her own class who want only gratification and are not fit to' 
contribute to the constitution of posterity? This latter seems the 
most optimistic because the most eugenic view. Growth studies 
suggest that such women may be products of arrest, since height 
and slenderness come first, and breadth of head, chest, and hips, 
which is the physical basis of maternity, are added later. If so, it 
is well that this type are sterile because, lacking maternity them- 
selves, they could not bear children that would come to the full ripe- 
ness of man's estate. Whatever their origin, the tragedy is not when 
they mate with their kind, but with those whose supreme desire is 
to be fathers and found families. This type, at any rate, should be 
known as it really is, and their diagnosis should be a part of the 
education that fits young men for marriage. 

It is very hard for a mother ta be rich, especially to become 
suddenly rich, and to be a good mother. In no age or land is this 
shown on so vast a scale as now and in this country. Great pros- 
perity is dangerous and hard for women, perhaps even more so 
than for men. Through long ages of past subjection women have 
been bearing burdens and often bad treatment, while now those 
of the well-to-do classes have fewer duties that must be done and 
more leisure, are more exempted from the burdens of life, more 
waited on by servants, flattered and pampered by men, better 
dressed, more given over to amusement, show, and pleasure than ever 
before in the world's history. The number of such women is un- 
precedentedly large and is increasing. Treated as dolls, some be- 
come so, or as idols they become arrogant, exacting, and above all 
their natural altruism is turned into a selfishness that is rank and 
almost inconceivably extreme. From bearing their full share of the 
burdens of life, a few generations ago, they are now living one con- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 477 

tinuous round of pleasure. Their husbands toil that they may be 
lilies of the field, are proud of their beauty, adorn them with costly 
ornaments, surround them with every luxury, vying with each other 
that their wives and daughters may outshine, outentertain, outclass 
those of others in extravagance and display. It is now a hard 
doctrine but a true one that all women need work, pain, suffering, 
no whit less than men and perhaps more so. They need more or less 
hardship to bring out their best qualities. These haughty queenlets 
who appear like fashion plates, who dictate, demand and command 
cannot possibly be good wives, still less good mothers. Never have 
such large numbers of their sex made such heavy demands upon men. 
The man who declared that if he could choose his heavenly lot it 
would be to be born an American woman of this class, let us hope 
for his own sake was sincere and not a humorist. 

We must realize that for all our boys and girls to-day the old 
ideals of absolute purity in thought, word, and deed are im- 
possible, and that prudery and reticence are co-respondents 
with temptation for many a lapse from virtue, although I 
think we must on the whole consider that the youth and igno- 
rance of girls are even less dangerous than are industrial condi- 
tions that force so many thousands of them in the later teens 
to work for from three to six dollars per week, supporting 
themselves where the standard of comfort is so high and in an 
age when the instinct to display is so strong. Incidentally, 
too, we should not forget that deep down in the s'oul of every 
man and woman lies an inveterate tendency to condemn in 
others thoughts which they themselves have struggled against, 
and that there is no oblocjuy that w^e tend to mete out to others 
that is (fjuite so great as that with which we would visit the. 
faults we are always fighting against in ourselves and no de- 
lusion greater than that by severe judgments of others we 
tend to establish ourselves more firmly in virtue. This is far 
deeper than hypocrisy, although the latter, of course, exists in 
those who ostentatiously condemn their own secret vices in 
others. 

There can be no doubt that most young men, even in col- 
lege, but especially years before, commit errors and suffer 
grave dangers from ignorance. Some have thought that be- 
tween the ages of fifteen and twenty sexual errors are the 
cause of more illness and pain than all other diseases com- 
bined. It is hard for the young to realize that the first pur- 



478 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

pose of sex is procreation and not pleasure, that sex is a creative 
function, that youth cannot become mature unless the glands 
continue internal secretions which must not be interfered with 
by those that are external. Sex is a great quickener of mind, 
intelligence and especially of the imagination and the higher 
sentiments. If there is excess or defect, it is self-respect, will, 
mind power that suffer. The individual tends to become 
solitary rather than social. His individuality is not completed 
because general nutrition is interfered with. Boys abnormal 
in sex are generally either nervous and restless or dull and 
always unable to do continuous, hard mental work. Thus the 
sex organs have two functions : the first is reproduction and 
the other is to give force and energy to all other parts and to 
character generally. All work involving great effort, either 
mental or physical, requires sexual temperance, and Delilah 
always robs Samson of his strength. Again, many young 
people do not know that occasional^ spontaneous emissions are 
normal and necessary for young men. The only danger is ex- 
cess. Sex is generally dormant as such up to puberty and 
should not be too strong during the earlier teens. It is, how- 
ever, an appetite that simply has to be controlled. Some of 
the very worst falsehoods are commonly believed. The most 
unfortunate of these is the notion that exercise of this function 
is a physical necessity or preserves virility. Both these prop- 
ositions are utterly false. It is precisely as physiological to 
speak of exercising the lachrymal, mammary, or other glands 
to keep them from atrophy. The latter is caused by excess, 
especially if it be premature. Dr. Morrow, in whose admi- 
rable little pamphlet these concise directions are given, tells us 
that he has high authority in the Catholic Church for stating 
that when a lay brother who has not taken vows leaves a mon- 
astery after a long practice of chastity and marries, such unions 
are generally very prolific. Another wretched error is that the 
ordinary principles of truth and morals do not apply in the 
sphere of sex, and that chastity is not natural for men and 
that nature will tolerate a wild-oats period. Facts show that 
it is not the most virile, vigorously sexed men that are most 
given to licentiousness but those who have been made weak 
and irritable by unnatural or excessive practices. Idiots are 
often most active of all sexually. As to the insistence that 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 479 

one has a right to do as he pleases in this field, it can certainly 
be said that he has no right to injure others. Wedlock, with 
children, should enter into the life plan of every young man. 
He should know that nearly all lewd women are diseased and 
that medical statistics show that those that are youngest and 
most attractive are now usually most sure to be diseased. No 
circumspection, not even protectives, are effective safeguards 
against the dreadful taint of venereal disease, the main facts 
of which everyone should know, and especially that, in Dr. 
Morrow's phrase, " a leper would be infinitely less dangerous 
to others as a source of contagion than a syphilitic." He adds 
" the greatest criminal is he who poisons the germ cells, for 
he poisons life at its fountain head," and " gonorrhea and 
syphilis are the most potent factors in the depopulation and 
degeneration of the race." The former, once thought to be 
more or less harmless, is now known to be in women the source 
of most of the troubles of their sex. 

Drink that intoxicates immensely increases sexual tempta- 
tion. Forel estimates that 76.4 per cent of venereal contamina- 
tions are made under the influence of alcohol and that most 
of these occurred before the age of twenty-five. By far the 
greatest temptation of student life from the dawn of the high- 
school period through college and even through the university 
is found in this sphere ; and the only possible way to meet it is 
by vigorous assertion of the will which, if it cannot control 
this impulse, is liable to be a cowed and beaten thing. Of 
course, control is of all degrees, but this is perhaps another 
chapter. 

My own most radical belief is that we shall never entirely 
solve the complicated problem of sex education by any, or 
even by a combination of all, special methods mentioned above, 
although all of them doubtless have their place and do good. 
If sex is as fundamental and all-conditioning for human well- 
being as nearly all eminent experts now claim, it follows that 
it must be made correspondingly central in education in a 
way to unite its chief topics into an organic whole, that fits 
the successive stages of human development so as to utilize 
the intense and unique interest that now goes to waste. We 
must, in a word, make a special curriculum to this end and 
devise new courses and text-books. First, I would have botany 



48o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

drawn on in a series of texts graded to age, more or less apart 
from the more elaborate laboratory methods and stripped of 
technical terminology, setting forth the methods of plant ferti- 
lization, showing how the male and female parts differ, what 
blossoms and inflorescence mean, how the seed grows, 
and the provision of nature for its protection, fertilization, 
and nutrition, the whole wondrous story of insects and 
their role in plant life, how the winds and water and many 
cunning and clever devices bring the sex elements together, 
how plant species increase, decrease and die out, what man 
has done from the first domestication of cultivated plants 
down to Burbank and De Vries, etc. All the chief and salient 
facts from Darwin down to the present should be culled, 
ordered, popularized, and then this basal part of botany should 
be given as intensely humanistic and moral a character as pos- 
sible without being direct enough so as to seem to the pupils 
to be shaped with that chief end in view. The world has never 
yet had a botanist who was also inspired by the true spirit of 
the pedagogue and of insight into the nature and needs of the 
child's soul. Thus, up to date, there is a sad void in our 
scheme of pubertal and prepubertal education which this topic 
is admirably calculated to fill. For boys, and still more for 
girls with their intense love for flowers, which means so much 
to them that man cannot fathom/ there is a unique opportu- 
nity to feed this natural appetite now so starved. This of 
course would not necessitate for all, instruction concerning 
herbs and trees from plant lore to forestry and gardening, and 
w^ould appeal only incidentally to other interests than those 
that root in reproduction. The vitalizing personal touch 
comes only with the sweep of the great laws that make vege- 
tation eloquent with lessons for human family life. That this 
touch is rarely given in our high-school courses of botany is 
a wasteful mistake.^ 

Secondly, the same should be done in biology, beginning 
with the lower forms of life. We have now a vast body of 

' See A Study of Children's Interest in Flowers, by Alice Thayer. Pedagogical 
Seminary, June, 1905, vol. 12, pp. 107-140. 

- In Prosper Merimee's L'Abbe Aubain, the heroine, beginning to love the 
abbe, finds an old and dried bouquet and tries to induce him to tell her its history 
but at first in vain, so she prevails upon him to teach her botany. In this she says 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 481 

facts concerning sex and reproduction in lowly, aquatic forms 
and still more in insect life — eggs, time, place, and manner of 
deposition, nests, home-builders, larvae, their care and defense, 
and all the wondrous instincts that show the subordination of 
every item in the life of the individual to the vaster interests of 
the race some outline of which should be known by every boy 
and girl before and during the early teens, for this would pre- 
pare the way for broader and more harmonious insight into 
the essential mysteries of life, reproduction, disease and death. 
All this is really ethical and practical to the core, and is the 
vital breath and native air to the sex instinct in its period of 
eclaircissement, when it becomes dominant and needs intellec- 
tualization for its proper control and guidance. Then, too, 
there are all the lessons from the secondary sex qualities — 
antlers, ornaments, plumes, wattles, and the countless love an- 
tics and types of animal courtship together with the phenom- 
ena of sexual selection. All these prepare the soul for meeting 
the stresses of the age of sex metamorphosis and suggest what 
parenthood means in the order of nature. It is the facts of 
natural history rather than those revealed by the microscope 
(which latter should not, of course, be neglected) that are 
needed. Here, too, belong the struggle for survival, the great 
fecundity of some lower species and the elimination of the 
unfit, and the increasing prevalence of better and more adapted 
types of life. Evolution here is full of precious and yet un- 
utilized lessons for virtue, and brings in the larger view, cures 
the myopia for time so common in the young that makes them 
blind for all the long-ranged forces that control human destiny. 
Here, too, belongs an outline of the lessons from domestica- 
tion, how and by whom achieved and its effects. Some of the 
laws of animal breeding as seen in poultry, pigeons, horses, 
dogs, and domestic animals should have a place. Thus here 
again we need a series of texts up the grades by zoologists 



she made astonishing progress, "but I had no idea botany was so immoral, so hard 
for a priest to explain. Flowers, you know, my dear, marry just as we do, but most 
have many husbands. One set is called phsenogams — if I have the barbarous name 
^which means they marry openly in the town hall; while the cryptogams marry 
secretly. It is all very shocking. At first I was so silly as to shout with laughter 
at the most delicate passages, but now I am getting cautious and ask no more 
questions." 

32 



482 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

who are also humanistically, ethically, and even religiously 
minded — a type of expert rare indeed to-day. Why does not 
some rich man, or, perhaps, better, woman (for she would be 
more likely to see and appreciate this need) offer a prize for 
such texts of a character which could now be prescribed by a 
syllabus or programme and which if generally introduced 
would not only mark an epoch in the field of sex instruction 
but would greatly raise the level of intelligence and increase 
the body of vital information possessed by all? 

Thirdly, in the field of inans development we also need 
texts that should deal delicately, yet plainly, with the history 
of marriage and the family, not omitting the story of woman's 
social and domestic position up the culture stages, and treating 
also as systematically and economically as possible of a large 
variety of such topics as the care, treatment, and training of 
children, apart from the specific education of the school. There 
should be a brief outline of educational history, and the story 
of the home, much about parenthood, and the influences that 
tend to magnify or destroy its importance. In this domain, at 
least in the college grade, should come some treatment of both 
the culture history and the physical and pathological aspects 
of sex diseases and weaknesses that undermine races and 
nations, the causes of infertility, race suicide, the nature of 
adolescence and senescence, the age of nubility, the hygiene 
of wedlock, and I am inclined to think something rather 
specific concerning the virtues of fatherhood and motherhood 
before and after childbirth ; and such a course should not omit 
mention of the social evil, white slave traffic, prostitution and 
its regulation, pornographic literature, art, and the laws and 
work of the societies for the suppression of obscenity and vice. 
Divorce should have a brief chapter and eugenics a longer one. 
There should also be something concerning the psychology 
of sex and love, together with its history in various ages 
and its meaning. An important chapter would deal with the 
relations between the various religions and sex, and another 
would show how the imagination and the feelings root in and 
irradiate from this part of our nature, and how inconceivably 
plastic the instinct is. There should also be some hint of its 
grosser forms, and how these often very repulsive factors may 
be sublimated and spiritualized into love of the good, the 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 483 

beautiful, and the true, and transformed into ambition, achieve- 
ment, creativeness, and the rest. Something should be taught 
concerning the forms of temptation and the modes of resist- 
ing it, and a little about the social treatment of girls who go 
wrong. Certain common errors concerning the reproductive 
function and its control need explicit refutation. No young 
man or maiden should graduate without some knowledge of 
the hot battle between virtue and vice that goes on in every 
individual soul and in every community. All this should be 
taught, of course to the sexes separately — more directly to 
young men, more indirectly and more affectively to young 
women — to the end that they be intelligently interested if not 
enlisted in the agencies of social welfare and informed of the 
work of all the chief societies that work in so many ways for 
purity and for posterity. Such a course might long-circuit the 
physical instinct and refine the soul and bring it into living 
rapport with the moral forces of the world, insure against 
personal error, and preform choices, bringing enlightenment 
into a field now festering with ignorance, error, and supersti- 
tion. The texts needed here would of course also be of a new 
type that does not now exist. 

Now, if we could have a society of all purity societies to 
organize the various medical, religious, and sociological en- 
deavors leavened by the right admixture of biological, physio- 
logical, and psychological knowledge, such courses might well 
be set up as the goal of such an organization. It has not yet 
entered into the heart of man to conceive the amount of genu- 
ine scientific knowledge that a deep interest in sex could carry 
and vitalize. No other apperception organ has such power to 
learn or assimilate. The acquisition of knowledge which this 
zest could effect — and that naturally and without fatigue — is 
probably quite incredible. Thus the plea for such a new curric- 
ulum might rest its claims solely upon mental economy, and 
find here a new noetic faculty not yet brought into action 
in the educational field. In the higher pedagogy, the altar of 
this new muse will occupy a very central place. This kind of 
knowledge has little need of the methods of review and exam- 
ination ; but if taught aright, and in due sequence, richly set 
with illustrations, it would sink deep and at once, by what the 
scholastics called " first intention." This kind of knowledge 



484 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

has no need of analysis or of methodization (save whether its 
items fit ages) or demonstration, but is apprehended as a 
whole. I am convinced that it would bring at once a great 
increase of intelligence into the world. We should be surprised 
to see how this new interest would not only augment acquisi- 
tion in its own but irradiate into other fields. The knowledge 
thus acquired, too, would have a practical cast for any other 
sort of knowledge, because so near to the Platonic ideal that 
knowing is doing, for to know virtue is at least halfway to 
being virtuous. 

To those inclined to object to the plainness of instruction 
advocated above, I would reply that the specific studies of the 
minds of childhood and youth show that they contain welter- 
ing masses of falsehoods, half truths, and errors, some of 
which are quite prone to bring moral and physical disaster, and 
that the budget of information that they actually possess con- 
tains indecencies unsuspected by parents or teachers, compared 
with which all outlined above is purity and chastity itself. More 
than this, the errors due to withholding truth cause incalcu- 
lable waste of mental and nervous energy, bring distrust of 
the veracity of parents, false theories, worries, fears and un- 
certainties galore, clog and arrest the very intellect, muddle 
conscience, and mislead the will, disorient the feelings, and 
lay the foundations for many a neurosis and psychosis later, 
when plain information would disentangle anxious perplexi- 
ties, remove deep and often unconscious worries and tensions, 
bring a great peace and normalization of soul and enable youth 
to face the world with new courage, hope, and resolution, to 
say nothing of causing marked reenforcement of health by re- 
moving neuroses and mental symptoms themselves, which are 
so prone to prevent the attainment of full maturity of body 
and soul. Of all the many needs of education, I have slowly 
come to believe something like this is the chief one. Like fire, 
sex is a wonderfully effective servant but the most disastrous 
of all agents if it becomes master. 

To those who say we cannot work out such a course be- 
cause there are no people who have the rare combination of 
scientific and ethical humanistic qualifications required, I reply 
that this difficulty is indeed grave. The pure scientist, who 
would follow the truth wherever it leads, is as impatient of the 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 485 

demands of moralism as the artist who cultivates art for art's 
sake alone. Most physicians seem tied-^some tO' be sure with 
longer, some with shorter tether — to their collection of horrid 
facts and figures concerning disease, and hence rely too much 
on the appeal to fear, knowing very little of the broad bio- 
logical basis of sex and nothing of sex psychology, and with 
no adequate appreciation of the far harder but yet more effect- 
ive prophylactics of enthusiasm for physical development or of 
zest in intellectual and religious things. Most puritists have 
zeal without sufficient knowledge. Thus none realize the full 
magnitude of the problem or the all-pervasive dominance of 
what is at root sexual; and hence all tend to emphasize their 
own partial ways and find it hard to rise to a higher synthesis 
of effort now needed. But, on the other hand, there is still 
force in the old dictum of Kant : that what we ought to do we 
can do; hence I am optimist enough to believe that a new co- 
operation of organizations and efforts will sooner or later bring 
both the realization of this need and methods of meeting it, 
even though this insight may come slowly and piecemeal. A 
long, hard, and joint effort alone can do what is necessary. 
For one, I am not without hope that in these days of the 
higher education of women, although colleges designed for 
them in this country now usually ignore all these questions 
and women's clubs taboo it, there will be found here, sooner 
or later, as in Germany already, women well trained in the 
biological, medical, and social sciences who will come forward 
to grapple with this theme, inspired by woman's greater sense 
of the social, moral, and religious forces involved, and help 
the western world to do this one thing needful. The situation 
surely ought to make a peculiar appeal to woman and her peda- 
gogic instincts even if they are often somewhat atrophied, 
because she can be educated with less danger of being dwarfed 
by specialization. Thus again das Ewig-Weibliche, if it mean 
woman's more generic, intuitive, and conservative nature 
which makes her stand closer to the race and gives her greater 
interest in seeking to hold it true to its destiny, may here be 
our hope and may perform for us a new Diotima function. 
She certainly ought to be interested in the applications of the 
new psychology of sex to the new and higher criticism of 
literature that might at once have its place in girls' colleges 



486 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

for its purely scholastic as well as pragmatic value. Being- 
established here, possibly these interests might irradiate into 
the more practical spheres of life. Perhaps if we could subject 
the suffragette mind to psycho-analysis, the instinct to be of 
more social and political influence might turn out to have a 
yet better expression in some such service.^ 

For youth, sex pedagogy is too large and progressive a 
theme and the need is too great to limit it entirely to pupil- 
lary or even academic grades. There is much which, while it 
might be taught before, should at least and latest be known to 
all those of either sex fully nubile or contemplating wedlock. 
Into this field one might well hesitate to enter, because it is 
now chiefly divided between prudes and quacks and because 
science itself is not ripe to do justice to the subject, and still 
more because the limitations of one's personal knowledge and 
distrust of his own judgment are made almost painfully con- 
scious. Let it be distinctly understood then that what follows 
is put forward only after mudi hesitation with a profound sense 
that it is only a tentative first effort to do two things : first, 
to popularize certain fundamental biological and physiological 
facts for pragmatic needs ; and secondly, to bring a little more 
into the consciousness of those who need it what the psy- 
chology of fatherhood and motherhood, in a sense most vital to 
all who have experienced them, mean; but which has never to 
my knowledge before been set forth in print. 

Not birth, but impregnation marks the beginning of life. 
For the psychologist, however, it arises still earlier in the mu- 
tual appetency of the mature ovum and sperm cell for each 
other which manifests itself in the soma as love. Of each of 
these, especially the sperm cell, the development history is very 
complex and still obscure. The life, growth, and all the activ- 
ity of the male and female body and soul up to the age of full 



^ See Schriften zur angewandten Seelenkunde, edited by Sigmund Freud, 
especially Der Wahn und die Traume in W. Jensen's "Gradiva," by Sigmund 
Freud. Heller, Wien, 1907, 81 p. Traum und Mythus, von Karl Abraham. 
Deuticke, Leipzig, 1909, 74 p. Der Mythus von der Geburt des Helden, von 
Otto Rank. Deuticke, Leipzig, 1909, 93 p. Wunscherfullung und Symbolik 
im Marchen, von F. Riklin. Heller, Wien, 1908, 96 p. See also The Oedipus- 
Complex as an Explanation of Hamlet's Mystery: A Study in Motive, by Ernest 
Jones. Amer. Jour, of Psychol., Jan., 1910, vol. 21, pp. 72-113. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 487 

nubility has for biology as its supreme entelechy the production 
and ripening of these master cells. As they are the souls of 
the body, perhaps the chromosomes are their souls. These 
cells are the fruit, as adolescence is the blossom of the human 
plant. They are bearers of the immortal plasma which con- 
nects us by a direct continuum with the first anthropoid and 
back through it with the first amoeboid form of life in the 
activities of which genetic psychology properly begins. There 
is a protoplasmic bridge, therefore, between the present and 
every preceding generation back to the dawn of life, every 
form of which perhaps converges backward to one cell or bit 
of protoplasm from which it all arose, so that all that lives 
belongs to one family. In the interests of germ plasm every 
other tissue and organ of the soma is developed from the 
simplest flagellum and tentacle up to the human body. In the 
lowest forms of life single cells grew large until they could 
no longer be nourished from without when they must either 
divide or die. They chose the former alternative. When the 
mother cell split up into two daughter cells there was no loss 
of matter or of energy, but new powers of growth and nutri- 
tion were set in action. These cells in time divided again and 
so on for countless generations. There was no rupture of 
continuity, nothing was sloughed off as a corpse. Each pro- 
tozoan cell was essentially reproductive. A little higher up 
the scale of life this immortal and ever-dividing germ sub- 
stance develops special organs to serve its purposes. These 
just in proportion as they are specialized lose reproductive 
power, that is, are subject to death. When a new organism 
bifurcates off from the old, these specialized tissues and organs 
are sloughed off, and thus as we go up the scale we can trace 
the development of the corpse and thus of death. Successive 
generations are only deciduous leaves, pulses, or nodes in the 
endless life of the plasma. Once there was no sex, but all its 
dimorphism was evolved to widen the range of useful vari- 
ation and to give growth and momentum acceleration and thus 
to make for progress and also to cause reproduction to be 
more economical. Why the male and female cell which di- 
verged from a lower differentiated type attract each other, no 
theory of tropism or hunger can explain. The soma is subject 
to old age, but even all its noneliminations cannot poison the 



488 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

germ plasm which is the seat of memory just so surely as 
memory is continuity of vibrations. 

In nearly all that pertains to the transmission of life, as so 
often in matters of less importance, consciousness says one 
thing but means something very different. Lovers think of 
their own happiness, but are really acting in the interests of 
the race. The intellect is largely a product of individual ex- 
perience, but instincts, feelings, and impulses which are larger 
and deeper represent the species and are relatively blind. These 
now assume control and act sub specie (uternatis for the race 
which is infinite and immortal. This unconscious nisus, not 
ourselves, that acts for posterity, is really the voice of another 
generation demanding to be born and well born. The plasm 
now dominates the mortal soma and all that goes with it, in- 
cluding conscious intellect. Thus, love serves the interests of 
a new individual and is only the annunciation that another life 
has begun to move toward incarnation. When two germ cells 
would fuse, all in the body and soul of the two adult organ- 
isms containing them is led willing captive and is impelled to 
conduct and thought that transcend selfish interests and do not 
fit or comport with those of the individual. The conduct and 
mood of normal lovers, however, is true to the unborn, to the 
future, and to the genus. Lovers are caught in a vortex and 
defy reason, custom, danger, and even death. This, poetry and 
romance rightly represent as the apparition of a higher power 
that can profoundly reconstruct the inner and outer life and 
convert selfishness to altruism. Blind as it is to knowledge 
and deaf to counsel and rebellious to outer constraint and 
reckless of personal advantage, it is, at its best and strongest, 
sagacious and loyal to the interests of the child that is to be. 
It is keen to appreciate beauty, but real beauty of form, fea- 
ture, grace in man or woman is only the perfect expression of 
health and wholeness, and strength and gracefulness are ripe- 
ness, mental vigor, and charms are sanity; i. e., perfection of 
form means ability to bear and nourish offspring in women 
and strength in man means protection and power to provide. 
Perhaps Schopenhauer is right that each sex seeks rectifica- 
tion in the other in the interests of posterity. If so there must 
be some counterpart relation of complexion, temperament, 
size, and perfect love could arise only between highly individ- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 489 

ualized men and women each of whom essentially supple- 
mented and corrected every deviation from the norm in exact 
proportion and in both body and soul, for then offspring 
would stand midway between both parents and would approxi- 
mate the type in every particular. This would explain the 
constant inspection and examination of each sex by the other, 
the instant perception of mutual fitness that may occur and 
also the natural aversion of those whose peculiarities would 
by summation remove the offspring still farther from the norm 
or mean. Ofifspring are thus a part of the body, and love of 
offspring is part of self-love. 

Inclination of two lives is, in Schopenhauer's phrase, the 
will to live of a new being. The desire to fuse is at root to 
realize the better synthesis of amphimixis. In love we have 
an apparition of the true nature of the species. The individ- 
ual loves what he lacks. He would match his manhood with 
her womanhood and rectify their mutual deviation. There is 
some illusion needed. The individual is seeking his own aims 
but really accomplishing those of the race. Love is at the same 
time the acme of individuation and the apparition of the 
species in an individual life. It deals with the deeper forces 
before which human law is froth. Man's love often begins to 
decline when that of the woman begins to increase. To avoid 
salacity and venery, to keep it on the highest plane, to develop 
all its myrianomus forms of expression, to keep the Platonic 
ladder open, is perhaps the chief earthly aim. 

In love there are endless plots and side plays. Creation sets 
the stage; nature is its scenery; the fading of its visions is 
its tragedy; experience is learning its stage technic. Earth 
was cold and pitiless till love came and gave all things meaning. 
We do not love in others what we hate in ourselves, but what 
we lack. Love means giving up one-sidedness. Osmosis, 
tropism and contrectation give new interest even to touch, 
especially in cestiis, and perhaps cause vascular congestion. 
Courtship is sex selection and protoplasmic hunger. Only the 
imperfect love. Projecting self into posterity means lust of 
immortality. Preparation for parenthood should be long, de- 
tailed, little should be left to chance, and the priority of 
woman should be respected if all is to be immaculate. Fear 
of death and shame of sex go together. The focalization and 



490 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

obsession is progressive and by many stages and there is a sub- 
sequent long period of systematization. Each attracts all of 
the other sex and is attracted. From the stage of phallicism 
to the highest conception of God as love, is yet a long way to 
travel. 

Each mature sex cell then tends to fuse and merge with 
one of the opposite sex and far down below consciousness 
each is drawn to and calls the other. The will of each to live 
is now solely the will to find the other, else both must die with 
all their complex, ancient, and slowly evolved potentialities. 
That most do so is really the primeval and supreme pathos 
of nature. Though unknown save to science, and so unwept, 
this preconjugal stage is one of vastly greater mortality than 
that of all the later stages of development combined. Every 
such cell that perishes is the extinction of an ancestral line 
that runs back to the beginning of life and one of the chief 
efforts of nature in evolving the higher orders of life is to 
economize this tragic waste of what has cost so much. The 
processes, minute as they are, by which these cells were evolved 
are more intricate, more vital, and probably took more time 
than all the subsequent stages by which the soma, i. e., the 
rest of the body of animals, was developed. If we only knew 

•^ all the stages of evolution of germ plasm even as well as we 
do what follows the union of these cells, we should realize that 
the saddest and most wasteful fact in the world is that such 
a vast majority of them die unwed. In this fact the pessi- 
mism of the future will find its strongest basis. However slight 
the influence of the life of the individual or even of a long 
series of generations is upon the marvelous structure and 
function of the sex cells, their potencies contain somehow the 
most perfect and indeed the only true history, because in these 

<, is about all that Nature found it worth her while to preserve. 
They epitomize all quintessential values and most truly re- 
member all the really important things that have happened in 
all the past of life. 

Thus, it is the cells which conjugate and they alone that 
experience the great salvation while all others are destroyed, 
and in their obliteration all the processes that evolved them are 
made vain and nugatory. Even their vast number was 
evolved to increase the chances of fertilization for the few 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 49^ 

elect that achieved the great goal of meeting their counter- 
parts ; for colors, ornaments, sex organs and all secondary sex 
qualities, selection itself and every device of animal and human 
courtship, even love, are to lessen this prodigality of loss. 
Truly biological thought sees in the struggle of these cells to 
survive by merging their individual being in each other, the 
original spring of love which in all its multifarious expressions 
is only serving this call of cells for one another. Far beneath 
all conscious purpose and effort this is basal and dominant 
throughout. With this cell appetency as its kinetic mainspring, 
love has become the mightiest power in the human soul and 
therefore will be the most important theme in a complete 
science of psychology. Nothing else so easily or so often 
conquers death itself and subdues and even reverses the uni- 
versal struggle to survive till the individual wills to die for the 
larger interest of the race. In no other field are conscious 
interpretations of motives or acts so inadequate, and despite 
the fact that the welfare of the species is so generally or entire- 
ly thought to be that of the personality alone. 

To understand the specific form of sex shame involved in cover- 
ing and uncovering the body we have to accept the indications that 
from so many diverse fields converge to the conclusion that at some 
early and probably long-enduring stage of human evolution man was 
proud of his sex and ostentatious of not only the organs but of all, 
at least anatomical, if not most physiological manifestations of its 
activities. In very many animal forms nature's system of ornamen- 
tation centers about those parts in the male. The young male was 
not only conscious but conceited of his recently developed virility. 
As flowers are ornamented sex parts, although their beauties are 
addressed not to flowers of the other sex but to fertilizing insects, 
so the very plan on which man's soul and even his body is organized 
is such as to call attention to these parts and functions, variation in 
which is extremely manifold, and what is more important, character- 
istic and envitalizing. After so many superposed strata of restrained 
concealment and convention that have now become instinctive and 
hereditary, it is very hard but yet probably necessary to conclude 
that the uncovered organs themselves were once the very focus of 
interest and charm, and that sight was the leading erogenic zone. 
Only thus can we explain the impulse of the exhibitionists, which is 
thus seen to be a psychic, as harelip is a somatic, rudiment. How 
strong this impulse is in pubescent boys, despite ages of repression, 
masses of unprintable and, to those unacquainted with the facts, in- 
credible data, show. Phallic worship, traces of which are found 



492 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

among every race, is also in part an expression of the sense of the 
supreme attractiveness of these parts and their functions, and it 
teaches us their value as apperception centers to explain the proc- 
esses if not the origin of the v^^orld by procreative symbols. This 
first prepared and predisposed the psychic soil to receive in due time 
the lofty doctrine of the fatherhood of God in all its first crass 
sensuous literature, and later in its spiritual form as love became 
sublimated and purified. Gross and carnal as this genetic factor 
of our higher religious life was, the frank acceptance of it confirms 
faith in religion by purifying that one of its rudiments which springs 
from this old and strong instinct and augments confidence in human 
nature because it has made a thing so high out of one originally so 
low. Even phallicism was soteriological ; that is, it was a product of 
man's instinct to save himself by sanctifying parts, ritualizing acts, 
generalizing ideas and purifying functions felt to be of momentous 
import and at the same time in need of control. 

The conclusion that the primitive instincts show off precisely 
what man now almost everywhere so strongly tends to conceal really 
rests upon evidence that cannot be adduced. Its foundations are in 
returns not fit to print concerning boys whose instincts are unre- 
strained and who are often thought more degenerate than they really 
are, and also in the repulsive, yet psychogenetically very instructive 
literature of sexual perversions and inversions, especially in those 
forms of aberration that are most often found among the young 
and are thus more spontaneous, involving competitive pride in every 
structural and functional manifestation of virility and in the as- 
sumption of supreme interest therein by the other sex. This be- 
comes abnormal and excessive and is without parallel in any of the 
forms of subhuman or animal life. This hypertrophy of this part 
of man's nature thus marks his point of divergence from that of 
the lower forms. The development of human nature contributed to 
make these parts and functions more focal to consciousness and that 
in several ways in the here tabooed literature. 

How, then, did sex shame and modesty first arise? All modern 
studies only confirm the faint hints of the book of Genesis ; the post- 
coital state of flaccidity and exhaustion demolishes at a blow the 
above pride by reducing suddenly to a prepubertal or sexless state, 
so that it is precisely this exhibitive instinct that is temporarily 
annihilated, and here modesty begins in the reaction. It is in this 
state that hiding and concealment and conscious shame arose. This 
neutral condition is normal but becomes socially conscious just in so 
far as the virile state had before been ostentatious. It would have 
been felt only toward the mate if she alone had been made aware 
of the precedent tension and there would have been less desire to 
escape from this condition into the active state. But there is now 
enhanced consciousness of others not only of the opposite sex 
especially during turgescence but of those of the same sex who 
despise the neuter state. Thus excess arose because ostentatious- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 493 

ness before clothing or the youthful impulse to exhibition alternated 
with detumescence and it was in the latter case that the instinct for 
clothing, at least local, arose. Had there been absolute morality of 
gratification for offspring only, man might have remained naked but 
unashamed. First, however, his old sex pride, born of precoital 
vigor, entered upon a conflict with the humiliation by gratification, 
and the latter in time won, because depletive states with their attend- 
ant shame were prepotent over the old erethic consciousness and man 
grew more ashamed because he had been too proud. We can imag- 
ine a period of which there is, to be sure, little anthropological 
evidence now extant,, when man was covered in the relaxed and 
exposed in the tense state, and many kinds of clothing are effective 
only in the former condition. There were, of course, other motives 
for concealment of the detumescent state. They would advertise 
perhaps illegitimate indulgence, aid in tracing those who had been 
guilty, proclaim a degree of exhaustion from its local signs whether 
due to excess or the approaching debility of age. Impuissance has 
always been held to be a reproach and the advance of this stage 
causes acute mortification which is the obverse of primitive pride. 
Finally, signs of vigor here mean virility, and the formidableness 
of many an enemy decreases with the physical symptoms of exhaus- 
tion. ^ 

The promptings of the sex instinct in the soul, especially in that 
of women, are so submerged that they are often unconscious of its 
very existence, even though their life be largely made or marred 
according to the degree of their normality. While the unwritten 
canons and codes of frankness differ very much in different ages, 
lands, and circles, there are always and everywhere limits which 
conversation, literature, art, must not cross. These are found in 
even the periods of most license and impunity. Again, parents often 
feel an almost insuperable reluctance to speak plainly of things in 
this field to their children, as do children to parents ; while patients 
are armed as with a triple mail of resistance against confessing to 
their physicians thing's that the latter need to know. The tensions 
caused by these manifold repressions constitute a long and intri- 
cate chapter in the pathology of sex, and are connected as cause 
and effect or both with nearly every form of aberration. Lies — 
conscious, unconscious, spoken, acted, social, personal — have here 
their chief center and stronghold. Here a sense of sin, melancholy', 

^ Richard Ungewitter, author of Die Nacktheit and also Nackt represents 
a movement in Germany for the direct cult of nudity. Those who advocate this 
cult urge that occasional exhibitions unclad to others would be a very great stimulus 
to body culture and would increase the aesthetic feehng for the human form divine; 
and if such exhibitions were public and held in the morning, much good might be 
done. H. Pudor distinguishes this movement with the greatest moral vigor from 
evening stage and popular nudities, which have the opposite effect from that which 
this movement strives to develop. 



494 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and every depressive state has its chief and hidden root ; manifesta- 
tions of human life, including religion itself, go with normality. Thus 
it is no wonder that psychic pressure between opposing forces is 
here so great, and the contradictions so diametrical that it is harder 
to be sane and temperate in speaking or writing upon this topic than 
upon any other. Here moderate men become dogmatic and extreme, 
the taciturn becomes loquacious, or z'ice versa; and mental poise 
seems almost as hard as perfect moral self-control. Moreover, all 
problems here are so infinitely complex — because so many of the 
chief interests of life center here. A recent writer finds over five 
hundred different theories of the nature of reproduction, showing 
that even science has lost its bearings in this realm where poetic 
license is always allowed the greatest literary extravagances, for 
who is so fond of superlatives as the amorist? one of whom ex- 
claims: "Who has ever loved without perjury?" and another 
" What gentleman would not lie here to shield his honor or that of 
a lady ? " Has man become morbidly self-conscious here ? Has he 
a sense of fear or guilt? Is our own experience or the facts we 
observe too painful to contemplate, and far more so to confess or 
teach the lessons of to others ? Obscenity alone breaks ruthlessly 
through all barriers and finds satisfaction, if a brutal, coarse one, in 
so doing. It may give surcease from the ubiquitous constraints and 
bring a sense of freedom that always has a certain sense of relief 
if not exhilaration. But every spoken or acted indecency is uni- 
versally condemned for several reasons: first, because it is grossly 
irreverent toward organs and functions that are essentially sacred 
and holy as is perhaps nothing else ; and, secondly, because it is 
always ignorant and such information as it conveys is usually mor- 
bidly perverted. Science and the social consciousness are now break- 
ing down many of these reserves in the interests of racial welfare 
and a new moral pedagogic attitude is now being taken toward sex. 
Once, tuberculosis was thought to be best treated by inclosed rooms, 
with all draughts excluded, as if pure, fresh air was fraught with 
special dangers, whereas now the out-of-do'ors with exposure to 
every wind and weather, day and night, summer and winter, works 
wondrous cures. Perhaps open ventilation and a less stuffy atmos- 
phere may be a therapy that will prove no less beneficent for the 
great and growing sex evils of our day. 

That they are both great and growing, few will deny, as even 
the meager statistics available indicate. If the darkness were sud- 
denly lifted in this field in any community, there would ho doubt be 
consternation at the bare facts which hypocrisy conceals. But we 
are not pleading for exposure of those who lead double lives, for no 
more good could come of that than from the revelations of divorce 
and criminal courts served up by the " yellow " papers. But there 
is now a wealth of vital, practical knowledge largely new — patho- 
logical, physiological, psychological, and sociological — that should be 
brought to bear upon the darkness of ignorance and widespread and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 495 

devastating errors of living. Even the slogan that whatever is 
biologically right is morally right, dangerous as it is, would on the 
whole doubtless level up, far more than it would level down, society 
as a whole. 

The story of the psychological causes of the extension of the area 
of interest from sexual to other parts of the body so far as motives 
of modesty were involved is relatively plain and simple. Sex in- 
terest would now be less direct, more circuited from primary to 
secondary sex qualities. As breast, thighs, hips, abdomen, etc., came 
to be regarded as sexual zones, accessible to sight and possibly to 
touch, they would at first be exhibited with pride as erotic charms. 
How strongly this persists we observe on every popular beach in 
bathing hours, in the passion of youth to parade their form and to 
set it off by every device of male coquetry ! Concealment itself is a 
positive excitant to the imagination. Here, too, youth and maidens 
are alert in preparing for and in undergoing each other's critical 
examination and in making new experiments of this kind. 

This newborn sense of shame and modesty that nature spreads 
out over everything sexual at the dawn of puberty and of its sex 
eclaircissement in boys, but far more in girls, is of the highest pro- 
tective value. It is an instinct which no amount of teaching or reflec- 
tion can supply the place of. It must be trusted for all it is worth, 
for here to deliberate is too often to be lost, so much wiser and surer 
is intuition than reason. Maidenly modesty is a kind of placenta 
in which virtue grows to the maturity of motherhood. It is the very 
opposite of prudery, for that is born of false knowledge. It has 
always been one of the best things in womanhood. It is not sullied 
by but carefully and completely assimilates all knowledge in the 
environment that is needful for life. At this stage instruction should 
be given girls if possible by mothers, else by older women friends who 
are dear and respected. It must be given only as interest is ripe and at 
the right moments, must be of right kinds and amounts. For this sort 
of information is utterly unlike that of the school curriculum because 
information thus given is not and should not be of the examinable 
kind, but this knowledge more than any other tends to sink to those 
subconscious strata of the soul which regulate both thought and 
life. Pubescent girls need indirect suggestive methods in which 
facts and laws are as it were so casually dropped that the learner 
hardly suspects any intention to instruct. Thus the more condensed 
this information is the deeper and quicker it is absorbed and be- 
comes practical, while if systematized and bepedagogued and ex- 
patiated on, as is done in most of the far too big books for the young, 
to read which hold the attention far too long upon these subjects, 
then the knowledge lingers in the mnemonic merely cognitive serv- 
ice of consciousness and is not at once transmuted into will power. 
Sex knowledge at this stage must not be a mere object but must be- 
come an organ of sense apperception, while in the latter teens teach- 
ing can be more methodic and systematic. 



496 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Mobius and Bosma, reviving the idea of Burdock, argue 
for wedlock based on passion rather than reason. These 
writers urge that all should marry in their bloom and in the 
fullness of youth ; that delay which brings in prudential and 
social considerations is injurious to vitality of a stock as shown 
in posterity. The nisus generativus is, if illuminated and 
guided by a little physiological knowledge, with sufficient but 
not too prolong'ed inhibition, the best of all guides. Overripe 
parents are not the best. Beauty should be considered as the 
very best expression of health. Its instant appreciation in the 
other sex is a kind of instinctive or intuitive diagnosis that is 
generally sure and true. There is no such delight as that in 
beauty. On the other hand all that is ugly and hateful is usu- 
ally more or less morbid. If man were not an animal smitten 
with the delusions of greatness he would be less prone to error 
here. Nervous men and women often attract each other, but 
such unions, while they may be happy, reenforce nervousness 
in the offspring, which is the only true criterion. The vitality 
of those not yet born should be ever in mind. Ziehen insists, 
against many authorities who hold the opposite view, that 
nearly every kind of healthful excitation aids to healthful 
control during the probationary years. Idealism and enthu- 
siasm repress and take the vigor from evil thoughts. If this 
is true then emotionalism is a kind of safeguard. 

Many criteria have been suggested for distinguishing 
maidenhood from the state following its loss, such as the en- 
largement of the thyroid glands and the circumference of the 
neck, the deepening and perhaps roughening of the voice, the 
state of the hair, greater sensitiveness of the vascular system 
as shown, e. g., in blushing and flushing and many others, but 
none, not even the most popular sign of local rupture which 
may be otherwise caused, is infallible. This should be known, 
for many husbands from implicit reliance upon certain of these 
popular tokens have been unjust and caused needless suffering.^ 
Among primitive people, pregnancy generally coincides with 
wedlock and with the loss of virginity. The average interval 
between the two events increases with civilization. During 



^ The old views upon this subject are copiously summarized by Schurig, Syllep- 
silogia, 1 73 1, and Parthenologia, 1729. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 497 

this period, some writers think there is usually a gradual, if 
slight decline of procreative energy so that children born a 
year or more after wedlock are more liable to be deficient in 
vitality or vigor of the developmental nisus. Some hold that 
this is not an invariable rule, but that in certain cases more 
or less delay may be favorable. This of course depends on 
many factors, such as the habits of the father before and the 
degree of temperance after wedlock. I can find no authority 
upon this subject who approves the customs of the honeymoon, 
for the advantages of rest and diversion are thought to be 
overbalanced by errors in diet, excessive venery and other 
irregularities. Wedding cakes, drinks, the long excitement 
and fatigue of the latest stages of courtship and the multifa- 
rious preparations for the modern wedding, with all its attend- 
ant nervous strain, are prone to leave the system too exhausted 
to perform well the supreme function of transmitting life. 
Under these conditions the curve of procreative efficiency may 
rise for days, weeks, and possibly for months after a fashion- 
able marriage till it declines again under the stress of exhaus- 
tion. Those who discuss these questions from the new stand- 
point of what is now called ethical or biological marriage so 
far take very divergent and often extreme views upon all these 
points. It is certain that for some, under exceptional con- 
ditions of health and environment, long delays before concep- 
tion are prejudicial to the highest welfare of posterity and 
that it is here that the interests of the unborn and the instincts 
of self-indulgence on the part of the parents are at their acute 
stage of conflict and every maxim of moderation is most 
needed. For a time the gratification heightens desire and 
those who make the marriage license a warrant for orgastic 
excess become for a season more or less intoxicated by 
pleasure, and only after a period of abandon that sometimes 
passes over into symptoms of more or less permanent aversion 
is it learned that a Nemesis, that in morbid natures may pass 
into postcoital rage and violence and in normal natures may 
lay the foundations for conjugal discord, has erected adaman- 
tine limitations to even love. Sometimes women welcome 
this postponement of conception in the belief that thus the ties 
of affection are strengthened, feeling that their husbands and 
not the interests of future generations have the first claim 
33 



49^ EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

upon them and thus without reahzing it, slowly become the 
mistresses of their spouses rather than wives. Some are en- 
couraged to do this by him and by the mistaken advice of 
friends. Universally known methods of prevention make 
this now possible. Others deem it better for the race to wait 
until the period of initial stress and strain has passed. 

Menstruation is incipient pregnancy and the close of each 
period suggests abortion at a very early stage. If the ovum 
is fertilized these symptoms pass over into those of gravidity 
by almost imperceptible gradations. The physical and espe- 
cially the psychic processes which attend the maturation and 
descent of the egg about which the phenomena of the monthly 
flux center and which cease with the petite abortion if ex- 
clusion continue and are enhanced if it is impregnated. From 
the moment this occurs the maternal body and soul are pro- 
gressively subordinated to the interests of the embryo, which 
causes profound modification of every tissue and physio- 
logical process. Not only the mother's appetite, digestion, 
circulation, complexion, and form are influenced, but the hair 
is in better condition, the eyes more expressive, the tempera- 
ture increases, pigmentation is augmented and even the finger 
nails, as Esreicht has shown, become thinner and more deli- 
cate. The posture is more erect as the back arches in and the 
abdomen protrudes and this erectness is the attitude of the 
pride one should feel when " elevated above the level of or- 
dinary humanity to become the casket of an inestimable 
jewel." The new pelvic focus of vascular activity affects the 
heart, or at least its right ventricle which may enlarge some- 
what to perform the new work put upon It. The quantity of 
blood is augmented and if the red decline, white corpuscles 
are increased. The glandular activity is modified and sali- 
vation is often stimulated. There is more vascular excitabil- 
ity as is shown in blushing and flushing, and this there is now 
much reason to think is due to the vasoconstricting action of 
the suprarenal bodies alternating with the dilating action of 
the thyroid secretions. The latter agency predominates. The 
child is formed not only out of its mother's food, but out of 
her very flesh, so predominant now are the interests of the 
species as represented by the embryo over those of the individ- 
ual mother. The nervous system, too, is more tense, active and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 499 

excitable. The knee-jerk increases as pregnancy advances, 
especially in its later stages, as do the other deep tendon re- 
flexes, both most with the first pregnancy, while electrical 
excitability and all the superficial reflexes save the abdominal 
are reduced. Nausea is more common and this is thought to 
be partly physiological and regulative of equilibrium. Vomit- 
ing is a convulsive and nerve controlled act and may lead on 
to eclampsia, convulsibility being in general more common in 
women than in men. Some think vomiting may have differ- 
ent causes — ^neurotic or hysterical, reflex or toxsemic. It is 
rare among savages and unknown in the higher animals and 
is said to be absent in those who menstruate without pain. 
This w^ould suggest that it is pathological. From a study of 
300 cases, Giles found it most common in the second month, 
that only one third were free throughout and that there was 
less sickness in the third than in any other pregnancy, the age 
of twenty-five being most immune. The tensions set up may 
overflow into the muscular system causing chorea. The 
uterus of course becomes the seat of active irritation and con- 
tracts rhythmically. This perhaps serves to impel the blood 
through the large venous sinuses where stagnant pools of 
blood tend to accumulate. This action, varicose veins, stimu- 
lation of the breasts or vagina and nausea seem to be all more 
or less correlated if not causally connected, but in this direc- 
tion the limitations of our knowledge are almost oppressive. 
One characteristic trait of pregnancy which develops 
upon the above basis is the pices longings or even obsessions 
of appetite. Some women are impelled to eat earth, sand, 
filth, ashes, pepper, salt, mushrooms, lemons, insects, raw 
meat, roots, and the most offensive substances. They may 
wish to smoke, drink, bite into human or animal flesh, swal- 
low pebbles or coin. The acute antipathies are also pro- 
nounced, if somewhat less so, and they include nearly every 
kind of food and drink which before had been preferred. 
Various theories have been held concerning these caprices, 
e. g., whims of appetite frequently express what the growing 
body of the child and the mother's system really need to per- 
form well the work of gestation. Another view is that the 
longings are in order to o'^^ercome nausea, but it is now known 
that the number of women with and without nausea who have 



500 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

marked longings is about the same. Again, the popular 
opinion that such piccE are natural suggests them to women 
and they are indulged because it is thought that to do so is 
beneficial to the child, although in fact it is of indifferent value. 
This is doubtless very common. Upon some women who lack 
them, they are sometimes almost imposed by the solicitude of 
friends who think them necessary to normality. Occasionally 
desires for special edibles are intense and persistent and some- 
times they rather suddenly turn into aversion. Ellis ^ states 
that women who have borne most children are least likely to 
have these desires, and they are most common in first pregnan- 
cies from which he infers that they are chiefly products of 
suggestion. Such whimsies of appetite were found in antiquity 
and exist in the Orient and among most savages and have thus 
been thought to be universal and normal. They are perhaps 
most common among women of the lower or middle classes 
leading simple and perhaps natural lives. Such longings, ac- 
cording to Giles, are chiefly for fruits, the apple, which is very 
prominent in mythology as a sacred or magical food, many a 
legend connecting it as well as pears, citrons, lemons, oranges, 
and other aciduous fruit with feminine taste, leading all the 
others. Cravings, as we have seen, are most common with 
young women and are, or may be, a revival or continuation of 
those of childhood. Children are subject to fits of greediness 
for delicacies that ma)^ become almost morbid. Girls especially 
crave sweets and fruits, particularly at the dawn of adoles- 
cence. Bell ^ thought that the food proclivities of children 
repeat the history of the race, and noted that in midadoles- 
cence there was a revived lust for fruit. This is doled out 
in such small quantities that the desire for it may be left so 
strong as to prompt theft to get it. Some think these appe- 
tites for fruit are themselves seasonal quite independently 
of the fact that the ripening and supply of it is so. In some 
places and periods, these desires of pregnant women are re- 
garded as almost hallowed and they are allowed in this condi- 
tion to take fruit freely where it is otherwise forbidden. Even 

^ Studies in the Psychology of Sex ; erotic symbolism. Davis, Philadelphia, 
1906, 214 p. 

^ An Introductory Study of the Psychology of Foods. Pedagogical Seminary, 
March, 1904, vol. 11, pp. 51-90. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5°^ 

law has often admitted the partial irresponsibility of women 
acting under this impulse. 

The more probable explanation of this very interesting 
phenomenon seems to be that realizing their condition and feel- 
ing that they must now eat and drink for two, women natur- 
ally pay more than usual attention to their diet. Feeling 
themselves somewhat privileged and possibly with somewhat 
lessened cares, they become more conscious of their likes and 
dislikes and the gradation of their tastes and aversions is laid 
off on a more extended scale. They become somewhat more 
careful in preparing their food and take more pains, while 
their appetite is at the same time becoming greater. Latent 
and past impressions of what they have enjoyed or what has 
been good or bad for them in the past crop out and their 
dietetic consciousness is intensified. All this tendency is reen- 
forced by the tradition that these preferences are significant 
for the child and they feel not only justified in indulging 
them, but study them and thus in self-indulgent or neurotic 
mothers the way to extreme and fantastic freakiness is opened. 
The new nutritive demands, moreover, often impel to a 
change of the quality as well as of the quantity of ingesta, and 
so hunger gropes and circumvallates in all directions to find 
its way to the new metabolic equilibrium which the system 
requires. Among the memories of former preferences those 
of puberty, which was the last era of reconstruction of nutritive 
habits, are revived easiest and first as a result of these grop- 
ings. Such recrudescences of earlier individual experiences are 
thus naturally and necessarily in the same direction as that of 
the phylum and thus the appetitive tendency reverts to fruits, 
raw meats, and other foods of the past of the race. It is thus 
that the tastes of pregnancy so often suggest the eating habits 
of an earlier stage of evolution, because the embryo which is 
now in this era of recapitulation calls upon the mother's body to 
supply what in some remote age our progenitors gathered 
from trees, dug from earth, or caught and killed for them- 
selves perhaps even before the age of the control of fire and 
cooking. If this explanation is correct, the call of the unborn 
child in the mother's body for the ancient pabulum of the 
stirp which was once supplied by its own voluntary efforts has 
now lapsed to an organic demand laid upon the mother's 



502 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

blood and body, and becomes a component element of her own 
body. Hence, the resultant is the compounded needs of parents 
and child which results in the compromise that harks back to- 
ward the earliest conditions represented by any of the factors 
with a strength and to a degree proportionate to the relative 
intensity of the two instincts : that of the mother for her own 
needs and that of the child for its. That these whims are 
often most developed in the earlier stages of pregnancy is due 
to the fact that the first demands of the embryo, though 
weaker, represent an earlier stag'e of the food history of the 
race than that represented by its more mature period of de- 
velopment due to the fact that the first unsettlement of the 
previous maternal dietary resulted in a greater range and 
plasticity of appetite and digestion, the initial arrest and re- 
version of which is more conspicuous to the mother and more 
observable to others. 

Birth- or mother-marks {Versehen, envie) are popularly 
believed to be impressed on the child's body or psyche by 
powerful influences made upon the mother during pregnancy. 
A child is born with deformed feet because the mother saw a 
rabbit killed by a cat which ate off its paws. A nsevus on a 
babe's arm was thought due to the fact that the mother tended 
the father who had been severely cut on the same arm and in 
the same place. A fleshy substance growing from the spine 
of a child was ascribed to the fact that the mother when 
milking had clung to a cow's teat which this excrescence re- 
sembled when kicked over. A bull frightened a mother whose 
stillborn child had a head " exactly like a cow." The child of 
a mother who had been frightened by a dog was marked by 
a large hair mole. A child born with flexed legs owed them 
to the fact that the mother had seen a beggar similarly de- 
formed. Another infant had a patch of soft hair on his cheek 
because the mother had been struck there by a young hare the 
father had tossed from the hay to her. A man bled a sow by 
cutting a patch out of its ear. The wife saw the act and bore 
a child whose ear had no helix. After reading a story in 
which one of the characters had six fingers the mother bore 
a child with an extra digit. The belief in influences repre- 
sented by these cases is as old as the Bible story of Jacob and 
the ewes, and Ellis states that this view was never seriously 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 503 

attacked till the eighteenth century, but now for a century and 
a half it has been denied and affirmed by physicians and is still 
an open and much-discussed question. It is hard to conceive 
how such influences can operate since there is no direct nervous 
connection between the mother and the child and few cases 
have been critically studied. In certain instances the cause 
of the defect occurred after the foetus was so well developed 
that if there was any influence it must have worked retrogres- 
sively and then reconstructively. Moreover, such cases are 
rare, Bischoff having found not one in a record of 11,000 
births recorded promiscuously. Still, not a few eminent gyne- 
cologists credit such influences and think that coincidences 
cannot explain them. Perhaps most would not deny that pro- 
longed and strong mental impressions may cause vascular and 
nutritive disturbances, irregxdarities, and even idiocy and 
arrest. The effects of mental and emotional disposition have 
been less discussed. Out of ninety cases, Dabney found 
twenty-one definitely ascribed to shocks occurring during the 
first three months of pregnancy, and thought that in these cases 
the cause occurred before the development of the part affected 
had been decided. Some have invoked modifications of the 
blood to explain it. Fere thinks strong emotions cause local 
diversities of pressure of the womb upon the embryo and so 
may at least cause foetal movements and that yet vaguer de- 
velopmental neuroses and disharmonies may result in mal- 
formations. Experiment shows that slight causes such as 
odors may profoundly modify the embryonic growth of chicks. 
The relations between mother and child in utcro are of course 
extremely intimate and are not unlike those between the chief 
subordinate parts of the nervous system in the same child 
when they are growing from independent centers and have 
not yet joined, or the connections may be analogous to that be- 
tween the gland nerves and the brain. Parts of the latter de- 
velop first in relative independence of other parts. Marshall 
suggests that thus the embryonic processes form a subordinate 
and parasitic part of the consciousness of the mother and 
speaks of two brains that may be attuned to coaction, while 
emanation, influence, and even telepathy have been suggested. 
Pregnancy induces a unique psychic state, in some causing 
tension, in others relaxation. There may be depression or 



504 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

exaltation, hysteria or apathy, increased or diminished sex 
feehng, heightened or dulled intellectual states and processes. 
It is thus a paradoxical condition. Till very recently no preg- 
nant woman ever sought to express her psychic states, but 
that these should be known and controlled and that they have 
an important influence upon puericulture is certain. Even 
Ellis says that we can here do little but wonder and adore as 
in the presence of a divine creative act. 

Consanguinity of parents per se perhaps exercises no un- 
favorable influence upon children. So at least Feer ^ argues. 
From a summary of the copious literature and statistics upon 
the subject, it appears that only in retinitis pigmentosa and 
congenital deaf-muteness, and possibly in a few other diseases 
can a predisposing cause be traced to the blood relationship 
of parents. Qf course parents who are relatives are more 
prone to the same diseases or more likely to be exposed to 
untoward external influences and it is to these that the dele- 
terious effects of the marriage of relatives is to be chiefly 
ascribed. There are many cases of children of consanguineous 
parents who are normal in all respects through life. Enthu- 
siasts for race improvement have often urged legislation re- 
specting the degrees of relationship within which marriage 
should be allowed, but as the evils of inbreeding are insignifi- 
cant in comparison to those arising from the intermarriage 
of consumptives, syphilitics, deaf-mutes, insane and alcoholic, 
restriction laws, if any are to be enacted, should begin with 
these latter. Many authors urge that human inbreeding tends 
to reenforcement and potentialization of heredity in certain 
directions and to diminish not only variation but energy in 
others so that new blood is needed for new combinations. If, 
and so far as these accented qualities are good, wholesome 
variation may result. The problem is best studied among 
animals and plants which breed more rapidly than man -and 
here full-blooded stirps often thrive for many generations 
with not only inbreeding, but even with Incest. Thus more or 
less stable race constants may arise and fertility as well as 
hereditary effectiveness may be augmented. But beyond a 

* Der Einfluss der Blutsverwandtschaft der Eltern auf die Kinder. Karger Ber- 
lin, 1907, 32 p.. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5^5 

certain very variable point, degenerative processes develop yet 
more rapidly and decadence results so that crossing brings 
wholesome reconstruction. Both primitive and transition 
races seem most immune, while with those that are civilized 
bad results appear sooner. Reibmayr ^ urges that human cul- 
ture has been very dependent upon, limiting both by culture 
and by law the racial range of intermarriage, and if the latter 
be freely contracted with members of lower stirps progress is 
arrested. Not only caste but language and religion have set up 
wholesome barriers. Bees and ants owe their high instincts to 
inbreedings. Yet, if restrictions are narrow or too long con- 
tinued, rigidity and stagnation result. Then crossing with 
vigorous but less developed stock brings new life. Once 
hereditary disease was far less than now so that the rhythm of 
the three stages, inbreeding and progress, stagnation, mixture, 
and renewed progress followed each other with less rapidity 
than now. Among the ancient Persians, Egyptians, and the 
Incas of Peru, brother and sister, father and daughter, mother 
and son, married with impunity and the last of the Incas is 
said to have been the fifteenth generation of marriage with a 
sister which was proscribed. Lorenz is inclined to think that 
this worked very favorably for ennobling the race under the 
conditions that existed then and there. For determining the 
optimal degree of relationship that is favorable, of course we 
have no norm. In many statistical studies of important data 
even the degrees of relationship are often omitted. One of the 
best of these by George Darwin ^ in which the results of the 
marriage of sisters' children appears, shows but surprisingly 
little deleterious effect. The best data are from the studies of 
special diseases, but often here methods are still unsatisfactory, 
and consumption, e. g., is so very prevalent everywhere that 
it is difficult to obtain a reliable basis of comparison. The 
best of all recent studies are those by Mayet ^ who compiled 
his data from 150,000 inmates of Prussian institutions and 
who showed that for even such diseases as simple insanity, 
paralysis, and epilepsy, the effect of the consanguinity of 

^ Inzucht und Vermischung beim Menschen. Leipzig und Wien, 1897, 268 p. 
^ Die Ehen zwischen Geschwisterkindern und ihre Folgen. Leipzig, 1876. 
^ Jahrb. d. internat. Vereinigung fiir vergleich. Rechtswissenschaft und Volks- 
wirtschaftslehre, 1903, pp. 193-210. 



So6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

parents was extremely slight, if indeed it was a factor at all, 
although for imbecility and idiocy a slightly better case was 
made out. Even though we may doubt the full effects of con- 
sanguinity per se, such marriages are in fact usually unfavor- 
able and may be highly so in civilized lands to-day because 
they involve a greater liability to similar deleterious circum- 
stances, while mixtures tend to eliminate hereditary effects, 
for we cannot escape the fact that in a general way destiny is 
ancestry. 

The genetic study of childhood begins with that of love, 
the spring of life; not the prenuptial love of courtship, but 
where all novels and romances that deal with it end, with 
wedlock. The one field is rankly dight with about every fair 
flower and every noxious weed that the rich soil of fiction 
and fancy can bring forth. The other, of vastly more import 
for the future of the race, is less accessible, so less often ex- 
ploited. Its joys should be and doubtless are on the whole far 
deeper and more lasting than those known to wooers or 
wooed. It is its dissonances rather than its harmonies that are 
most audible outside the reserve that veils the inmost circle 
of domestic life. Although medical records and those of 
divorce courts show the indescribable physical and mental tor- 
ture which sometimes exists in marriage, yet despite the sus- 
picions of gossips, the popular gibes of the stage and press, 
the coarseness of cynics, the black pessimism of roues and 
the often radical reconstructions of it proposed by fanatics, 
the wedded state with all its failures is, we must believe, on 
the whole and for the great majority the chief condition of 
human happiness. 

While comprehensive facts and statistics on matters so 
sacredly secret are inaccessible so that we lack data for all 
qualitative scientific statements, it seems probable that the ma- 
jority of husbands and wives do not yet follow one of the great 
laws of nature that even the commonest observation of animal 
life should teach, viz., that the female should determine the 
times and conditions of her fecundation. In all stages of 
life, save the human, the female makes this great decision and 
everything we know strongly indicates that it would be im- 
mensely for the good of posterity if this were the case with 
men. Motherhood should be craved, and if it is reluctant or 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5o7 

coerced is sure to be below its maximal efficiency. The deep- 
est, oldest, and strongest inclination of the wife is to accept 
her husband at the proper time and for the proper purpose. 
Of the former she is the best judge. If she permits herself to 
become fertile against these instincts, even because she would 
not disappoint, her motherhood cannot be ideal, nor can his 
fatherhood. This is the supreme natural right of woman and 
the entire movement of the last few decades for her emancipa- 
tion will be more or less abortive if it fails to attain this, its 
chief goal. The good husband can and should do much to 
control the desire of his partner, but the final verdict should 
always rest with her and she remains dethroned, without her 
crown, an exile from her paradise, until it does. In most of 
the recent efforts of her sex for larger liberty, more power 
and knowledge, the biological psychologist sees only a struggle 
toward this end. Though she may not recognize or under- 
stand it, all she has won is precious chiefly in so far as it helps 
to this great coigne of hereditary vantage, and even if she half 
unsex herself in the effort, she will make good later if she 
succeeds here. Beneath the thinnest surface, normal and com- 
plete love in every healthful woman is essentially hunger for 
maternity. Man can partly transmute this into lust or can 
more easily and perhaps does more often intimidate it by the 
very vigor of his passion into the fear that to bear a child 
might divert his interest to another and thus the woman's self- 
sacrifice and pain that should go out toward her child is lav- 
ished upon her husband. This is one of the tragedies of wed- 
lock. It has even been argued that if the cruel choice had to 
be made, strange women and dual lives on the part of the men 
would, from the biological view point of the good of posterity 
alone considered, be better than generations conceived on 
either side with violence, aversion, or by accident. But I 
know no scales to decide the relative weight of two evils both 
so great. 

While the attitude of no great numbers of men toward 
this ideal has ever yet been systematically canvassed, there 
is abundant reason to know that it varies greatly. Hundreds 
of communications that have come to me in the last ten years 
show that not a few young men contemplating wedlock re- 
solve with all the energy of soul they can muster upon just 



5o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

this course. Reasons for everything done or not done, while 
sincere, are more often fantastic and utterly foreign from the 
real motives that impel conduct in the field of sex than any- 
where else. Some fall away from their high resolve because 
many, if not most, wives have been led by others to expect 
both frequency and subjection and because men fear that they 
will be else thought deficient or subnormal in vitality, and so 
they exhaust themselves and set a pace that they know to be 
ruinous if maintained, but which they also feel it would be 
a confession to greatly reduce. This initial ignorance and 
misunderstanding of each other's nature and real interests and 
even desires is now as always the serpent that enters man's 
Eden. In other cases love itself decrees that the will of the 
partner with the greatest desire shall rule, and that of the 
other bend to it, so the way to Avernus is entered upon, when, 
if the weaker led there would be hope. It is a physiological 
law, too, that every excess brings reaction, be it a new 
sense of general insufficiency for the tasks of life or censor- 
iousness for the mate, whether passive or dominant and some- 
times of violent and tragic vengeance, as in postcoital torture, 
mutilations, and murder. A sense of weakness of either mate 
inclines to the postponement of childbearing till more favor- 
able seasons and this is one motive of the use of preventative 
measures now so well known in nearly all families in civil- 
ized life. The rhythm of inclination often differs between 
mated couples and one or the other hesitates, now that the 
matter is so easily controllable, to chance the hazard of the 
new fortune of parenthood. Very prevalent again is the senti- 
ment that at least a season — the wedding tour, the first year, 
etc. — may very properly be set apart for enjoyment before the 
interests of posterity are considered. If the abated vitality of 
children born short because engendered by parents who had 
selfishly wasted the bloom of their powers were understood 
by the victims of these ills, few commands in the Decalogue 
would be so violated as that to honor parents, for they would 
deserve only dishonor. ' Conscious overindulgence is often pal- 
liated by previous resolutions of atonement afterwards, such 
as by some exceptional restraint, by unwonted labor, rest, diet, 
vows of continence for a definite term, etc., and no moment 
of life is so fecund in good results as the brief interval follow- 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5^9 

ine those acts of the union known at the time to be excessive. 
Intemperance in the exercise of this function is probably the 
chief cause of the abatement of love, aversions, and separa- 
tions, and is the parent of a long list of evils now growing 
rapidly with growing knowledge of deaths, diseases, defects, 
insufficiencies, and perversions of children who have been 
robbed of the most primal of all human rights, that of 
being well born. These are but few of the ways by which 
the most laudable purposes of those about to wed have come 
to naught. 

The ideal of intercourse for offspring only which is also 
the general lesson from the animal world, where it is bound 
up with the fact that the female's voluntas or noluntas rules, 
is cherished by many types of Utopians and theoretical moral- 
ists and reformers, not counting here the fanatics of sex who 
call its function a necessary evil to be as nearly eliminated by 
asceticism as is possible without depopulation. The view of 
most who advocate this principle is expressed by the phrase 
" the more restraint, the better the product." That for some, 
perhaps many, and especially women, the rule is both com- 
mendable and attainable there can be no doubt. On the other 
hand, there are many who urge that this would involve too j 
great restraint, would abate love in man, since one of the 
grounds of his superiority to animals in nature is that in him 
love has acquired rights of its own which animals know not, \ 
that it would involve the eradication of a habit very slowly ' 
acquired by the race and which has come to have great hered- 
itary momentum. When we realize the impetuosity of this 
instinct, especially in young men, it seems at first a plausible 
view that Nature herself, if not by her prime intention has in 
her present, de facto, or if one pleases to call it, fallen dispen- 
sation adopted another less rigorous norm. Some again insist 
that she has provided for this by lavishing upon man, who 
excels animals in so many other respects, superfluous power in 
this also. The very diploma of manhood which she has con- 
ferred upon him elevated him above the laws of lower forms. 
Thus, men have both complimented and licensed themselves 
and granted charters and concessions to their own inclinations, 
thus keeping themselves in countenance and living as others 
do. This view is held by many candid and competent stu- 



5IO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

dents in this field whom no one could for a moment suspect of 
consciously compromising with or apologizing for selfish 
gratification as such, although so profound is the tendency to 
justify actual widespread practices that this ideal probably 
finds more whole-hearted advocates among maturer men in 
whom passion has begun to abate. 
r^"" We believe, however, that from the standpoint of the high- 
I est virtue, which is indistinguishable from the supreme good 
of the race, every attempt tO' justify indulgence beyond the 
\ actual needs of the continuance and increase of the race is 
\4r1erely specious and wrong, and that when we attain true 
knowledge of good and evil, such views will be cast beside the 
old and still widely prevalent belief of adolescents that the 
vital fluid is dangerous if allowed to accumulate. In fact, 
there is no disease known to medicine and no defect in off- 
spring known to students in heredity that can be traced 'to re- 
straint or continence, but those now known to be due to excess 
are of great and growing number. There is in fact one sure 
test, somatic, and yet as suggestive as conscience, and that is 
whether or not there is great, lasting, and subsequent enhance- 
ment of all physical, and elevation of all psychic, powers and 
satisfaction and not an inclination of desire, a new poise, a re- 
enforcement of strength and of euphoria, new ambitions, a 
greater power of accomplishment and endurance. This re- 
generation must be mutual and measured summatively by tak- 
ing account of both the man and the woman, although proba- 
bly the latter should on the whole count for more than the 
former, for her soul and body are better criteria and her ex- 
perience is more massive and normative. There must be nO' 
alloy of scruple, doubt, or anxiety, however caused, but only a 
sense of overwhelming good that has come to stay and has 
given life a new direction. The psychic factors in it all doubt- 
less greatly outweigh the physical if this too intrusive distinc- 
tion be given any place in so unitary and totalizing an expe- 
rience. Selfishness must be entirely and supremely transmuted 
into love, so that each can be happy only in and with the other's 
joy, and no vestige of duality remains, and the after-effects of 
it all must be so tranquilizing and perdurable that they long 
seem indefinitely preferable to repetition, and thus the joys of 
a full realization must and will for a long period eclipse even 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 511 

those of anticipation which made courtship and engagement 
so full of charm. 

The effects of the first conjugal experience upon young 
women though perhaps unduly magnified by the church, which 
has idealized virginity, are psycho-physically great. So much 
romance, curiosity, and perhaps desire, not unmixed with fear 
have focused in advance upon it that there is naturally a unique 
sense of realization and of initiation into complete woman- 
hood. One chapter of the book of life is closed and another 
begun ; a mystery is solved ; a goal attained ; existence is 
more real and many things take on a new meaning. In nor- 
mal natures the world seems suffused with a certain joy un- 
known before; physiological vitality is more or less enhanced; 
unused functions come into play; life is more completely polar- 
ized and charged with a worth and value unfelt before. There 
ought to be a mild ecstasy and exaltation of soul and the dull 
prose of life should become more or less poetic. If, however, 
there is defect on the one side or violence on the other, all 
this is changed and disenchantment may turn joy to ashes, and 
in an hour love may pass into deep-seated and permanent 
aversion. In the great majority of cases, euphoria is mingled 
with more or less disphoria, and thus these initial experiences 
are algedonic, giving a new polarity to human nature as it 
expands under the influence of its two sovereign masters, 
pleasure and pain. 

Good Fatherhood and Sexual Insufficiency. — To be an 
ideally good father one must be all a man, hearty, healthy, 
masculine, worldly, not a bookworm, a devotee or an ascetic, 
not predominantly sedentary in habit or too devoted to office, 
counting room, or shop, nor overabsorbed in frenzied finance 
or anything else very nerve wearing. He must not be chronic- 
ally anxious, penurious, or censorious, but must cultivate a 
more or less Aristotelian temperance in all things and be a 
little more capable of appreciating than of criticising. There 
must also be congeniality, content, more or less prosperity so 
that life can be a little easy going; a man must not be fighting 
a losing battle either in health, business, or repute. Nerves 
and negative tenets are both unfavorable to true and full 
paternity which must command the sincere respect and affec- 
tion of a wife, who must not be educated in a way or to a point 



512 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

that will cause her to feel him inferior. These qualities are 
essential for the old primitive relations which nature still de- 
mands and which so many conditions of modern life tend to 
pervert or thwart. Polarity is a vague, and affinity a dis- 
carded, and counterparts an incorrect, word, but each has 
some if slight designative value, though it be only provisional 
against the dawn of fuller knowledge. 

If the husband is effeminate, not completely sexed, over- 
strained or strenuous on the one hand, or inactive on the other, 
overprone to self-indulgence, exotically pious or transmundane, 
cruel, weak, peppery in temper, feeble or sickly in head, 
thorax, loins or limbs, or if he is exacting, exiguous, severely 
dogmatic, too insistently about the house or too long absent, 
if his conduct or character causes wifely jealousy or the slight- 
est fear of alienation of affections, or even any abatement of 
implicit confidence, if he does not deeply desire children and 
welcome the prospect of them even at the cost of self-denial 
and if his nature is not such as to inspire confidence so that he 
can practice it, if his moods are uncertain and fluctuating and 
he is subject to caprices, if he is prone to invading any of the 
privacies the wife loves and needs, does not trust her fully, 
meddles, is disposed to dominate where she should rule, has 
habits or even symptoms that cause her apprehension or 
physical disgust — such a man cannot be a perfect father. The 
body and soul of the wife constitute her an inconceivably subtle 
organ of registration for any and every such defect of his, deep 
down below her consciousness, and she cannot shield the child 
she is bearing from reproducing some resultants of these faults 
of full paternity. 

The immediate effects of masculine insufficiency are that 
the wife cannot yield herself completely and with the utter 
resignation, not to say abandon, that her whole system needs, 
to his embraces and there are subliminal and perhaps auto- 
matic reservations far below her control, and these occur in 
both body and soul and thus even coital experiences are imper- 
fect and that on both sides. These summital moments there- 
fore do not normalize life as they should and their rhythm is 
marred. The satisfaction which ought to pervade the whole 
system is only partial and perhaps fragmentary. It is not led 
up to gradually by caresses and other prolonged tokens and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX S^S 

stages of progressive endearment involving all the psyche and 
soma. Nature decrees a long and elaborate scheme of ap- 
proaches through which every advancing stage of first court- 
ship should be recapitulated. All her many curves that lead 
up to this sacrament of the transmission of life ascend grad- 
ually and never abruptly. Not only must every trace and 
residue of aversion and even reluctance be overcome, but all 
inclinations of every part and faculty should converge to- 
ward the focal event. Here the will and way of woman should 
be supreme and till her great biological function of consent 
is fully and joyously exercised, the interests of posterity for- 
bid the male to force his advances. Every element of his 
disposition that tends to make her violate this law, be it the 
nervous impetuosity that cannot wait a little for a greater 
good, the selfishness that can enjoy at another's expense, the 
defective love that can take without giving equally, or brutal 
aggression, impairs love and so impairs paternity. The weak, 
tense, neurotic man is always precipitate and this leaves the 
woman excited but not satisfied, never perhaps knowing what 
it is to come to a climax. The man thinks her cold when she 
is only slow and normal, while he is so sudden that he never 
dreams of her passional potentialities and still less of her pro- 
found needs which he only tantalizes. The sympathetic system 
and the pelvic brain dominate in woman and these are very 
slow but very climactical in their action. In man the ingre- 
dient of volition is far greater and the cerebro-spinal centers 
come more prominently into function and coerce the sym- 
pathetic ganglia at more rapid tempo. Nearly all types of 
defective husbandhood complete this function before wifehood 
is fully ready and in all such cases fertilization is more or less 
uncertain and quasi artificial. The effects of ever inhibited 
connection upon woman are deleterious alike to the conjugal 
relations and to offspring. The germ cell is left at the door 
and whether it is later taken in or finds its own way to the 
ovum, it may be conceived of as having to pass through the 
stage of unnatural experiences and to have to put forth ab- 
normal efforts to reach its goal all because the male function 
is incomplete. 

There is now growing reason to believe that this is one 
cause of the unique race suicide of native-born Americans. 
34 



514 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Where the air is so clear and ablaze with light and life and 
often very dry, where time is money and get-rich-quick 
schemes and snatched lunches accelerate the personal equation, 
and push and rush get there and even old age is not calm and 
restful but often marked by irritable weakness, it is perhaps 
not surprising that consciousness should encroach upon the 
vegetative system and sufficient time for the most important 
act of life be grudged or hurried through madly, as we gulp 
our whisky instead of sipping it at leisure like nature's gentle- 
men, or as we bolt our food instead of performing the full 
predigestive function of mastication. When even the sym- 
pathetic system of nerves normally slow in all their processes 
has come to act suddenly as does the cerebro-spinal system, 
rest may restore the balance between them and subordinate 
the latter which is newer and superposed to the law of the 
former as it should be. The reproductive act is as old as sex 
and for eons has been dominated by the ganglionic centers and 
their ancient sway and fashion cannot be invaded by the more 
recent cerebral modes of activity with impunity. 

Besides progressive sterility another effect of this sexual 
neurasthenia is degeneration of the female function. Woman 
in her prime is almost all first the sex and then mother, if we 
interpret these functions as broadly and as highly as we now 
must. Her entire life during the reproductive age is within 
the inner or the outer circles of the domain of love. Every- 
thing that pertains to it has worth, value, interest, and nothing 
else has. It has a wide, diversified realm richly dight with in- 
cident, charged with varied emotions ; but the nucleus and vital 
nodes of it all that give it not only unity, but reality are the 
few full supreme acts of love. If these are lacking, abortive 
or defective, her life is at best a little falsetto and unreal and 
there is more or less disenchantment, while the substitutes 
such as charity, art, and culture are sought; and denied the 
primal, women come to accept the second-rate choice of life. 
This is the case not only with the unwed but with wives whose 
husbands do not and cannot fully satisfy their bodies and souls. 
They break away from their proper sphere because man has 
not done his part to make them happy in it. Hunger is one 
great cause of migration and truancy and prompts those who 
suffer from it to seek other scenes, and it was because woman's 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 515 

Eden was in this sense Adamless that she is now retiring 
from it and taking refuge beside man in his own walks of hfe 
and work. Thus, as he became more or less evirated, she in 
corresponding degree must therefore become defeminized. 
She accommodates herself to secondary sexual functions and 
magnifies these because those that are primary are denied her ; 
and always man's counterpart, save where conscious imitation 
makes her like him, she became apathetic and slow in sex as 
he grew precipitate because she was not heated to the degree 
of fusion; her melting point has grown higher while his has 
lowered. One requires more and the other less than the nor- 
mal stimulus in order to evoke the complete response. Thus 
physiological misfits arise perhaps in part because males re- 
spond quickest to chang-es in the environment such as are 
involved in passing from the old world of less to the new 
world of greater tonicity, and woman, who adjusts to such 
environmental new conditions more slowly, may do so in time 
and thus a new equilibrium be established. Teeming Asia 
long ago attained stable relations, Europe is transitional, and 
America may eventually find a new equipoise in which the 
brain is more than ever regnant over the vegetative function. 
Husbands judge and weigh their wives when pregnant — 
and, indeed, on through lactation — by other standards, for the 
tests of motherhood are very different from those of wifehood. 
Here, too, questionnaire data have been gathered from one 
hundred fathers of different types. One writes : " While she 
had been fairly well before and seemed even better now, I 
feared a breakdown ere it was all over and worried at every 
symptom, first of all for her, but also for the child. I married 
for love and rather suddenly and had thought little about this 
as we were both young, but now I realized how nervous her 
family were and that one of her brothers had been dissipated 
and committed suicide and I had many forebodings." ^ " Three 
out of seven of her brothers and sisters were deaf and although 
she heard perfectly I dreaded lest our child should be born 
deaf. I remembered that she had not wanted children and 
feared it was from a sense of this danger." " She was so un- 
reasonable at times that I thought of insanity and even asked 

i Each of the following quotations is from a different father. 



5i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

incidentally if it had ever existed in any branch of her family." 
" She told me when in this condition that her mother had 
borne an abnormal child and that another was stillborn, and 
I saw that she was yet more weak and delicate than her mother 
was." " I knew there was consumption in both her family 
and mine and had heard that the disease was cumulative in 
the offspring, but I did not reflect on this beforehand, al- 
though I was warned. Now it came home to me." " I con- 
fess I was greatly grieved and disappointed that my wife could 
not nurse the child." " Her mother died in childbirth and I 
feared she would." " I realized that she had been an only 
child, her mother one of two, and her father one of three ; and 
so began to fear she would be barren and when she was with 
child constantly expected miscarriage or that a weakling 
would be born." " My boys were both slender and delicate 
like their mother and we had a hard time rearing them." 
" She was slender, used to lace tight and waS a good and true 
wife to me, but could not have a child." " My ideal always 
had been to have a large family like my brothers and sisters, 
but she was not that kind. The doctor said the trouble was 
with her and said it was on the wife's side about seven times 
out of eight, but he could suggest nothing and I grew de- 
spondent and thought of many things. She was very affec- 
tionate but I could not help thinking of divorce and sometimes 
it seemed my duty to our business and our name, but I did not 
and now it is too late." " Most of our acquaintances of our 
age had children, while we could not. It was very, very bitter 
and my affection for my wife paled a little, despite myself." 
" I never half appreciated my wife until I saw how easily and 
naturally she took to having and caring for children. She 
grew more beautiful, too. I never dreamed the slim young 
girl I married would do and be all she did and was as a 
mother." " Before I was the pivot about which all turned, 
now I was only mate and she captain, a jolly crew in the nurs- 
ery. It was all luck for I thought of her in the early days of 
our marriage as made only for my own delectation." " She 
had been a girl, but when her condition was known, she seemed 
to grow up into a splendid woman. I am a physician and 
know of the many dangers that beset every stage, but she suf- 
fered not the least from any one of them. Indeed, I was a bit 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5^7 

mortified that I had ahnost nothing to do, save at the confine- 
ment itself. I talked and warned and sometimes spoke of 
perils. She was good enough to say nothing, but she might 
have ridiculed and even taunted me in her heart for my fears." 
Some fathers fortunate like the last above seem to con- 
gratulate themselves smugly for their foresight in selecting 
such wives with an amusing and scantily veiled affectation of 
conceit and pose as if they would counsel young men to imi- 
tate them in the wisdom of their choice. A very few advise 
their sons to consider the mother of any girl they are inter- 
ested in and realize that the latter will be and do about as the 
former was and did, to consider if the family and stock is 
good, if there are substantial staying domestic qualities in the 
blood, strength, endurance, regularity, order, and even means 
equal to their own, from five to ten years' difference in age, 
no feministic theories too deeply ingrained, no too confirmed 
habits of coquetry, etc. — all these in a way that suggest the 
breeder's, stirpicultural view which is so bitterly and sometimes 
frantically resented by women, especially those whose defi- 
ciencies such standards suggest. This point of view has been 
the target of a great deal of popular ridicule. But one of the 
most pathetic aspects of life is seen when the young husband 
feels that the bride of his heart is weighed and found wanting 
in this supreme test to which the instinct of the most loving 
husband inevitably subjects her, however loyal he may remain 
and however tender his ministrations. Girls and their edu- 
cators should ponder this critical stage in a wife's life be- 
times. Every normal husband reaches a period in his develop- 
ment sooner or later when he wants offspring and heirs, 
wants them supremely, and if they are lacking he is quite 
prone to surmise that the fault lies with the wife. Often to 
himself he inventories her qualities of motherhood, and this 
examination is conducted by very different methods and is a 
vastly harder one to pass than that involved in the selection 
of courtship. Shortcoming here is, of course, more often con- 
doned because the love which first cemented two lives remains 
and also because men can make tolerable shift to live and even 
be happy in that. Even if there is inner alienation, outer ties 
often prompt the husband to make a virtue out of his neces- 
sity and there may be an effort to make even more of what 



5i8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

remains of love, but it is love with renunciation of its choicest 
fruit. Other husbands are a little more exacting or grov^ 
slightly more formal as duty is invoked to eke out affection, 
or they may become a little more demonstrative outwardly 
to make up for waning inner spontaneity. Some husbands 
abandon themselves more to selfish gratification with their 
wives as the chance increases that such excess will not impair 
offspring, while others become querulous and censorious as if 
they had been deeply wronged and some lapse toward dejec- 
tion. All this may be done while keeping up a brave show of 
indifference. The fact that there is a chance that it is his 
fault and may be considered so by his own acquaintances is 
profoundly mortifying to his sense of manhood and this ex- 
posure to ridicule he may charge up against his wife. As a 
man of the world, he fancies many things club gossips might 
say of him, as he has heard them talk of others. There is al- 
ways at the best in aging childless couples something a little 
falsetto in their love, as there is a pathetic pitifulness in their 
condition. They have compromised with life and must put up 
with only the second best of it. Name and estate approach 
extinction. They have not been kept young by children, have 
not profited by them to project their own being into the future 
and they must die doubly, once in their own persons and again 
for their race or family. If poor, there are none to care for 
them in old age, and if rich, their accumulations must be dis- 
sipated among relatives or strangers. Such are the obvious 
and inevitable thoughts that begin first faintly and then more 
palpably to hover over the horizon of consciousness and haze 
the brightness of its skies when the possibility of childlessness 
is progressively realized and the higher dispensation of pa- 
rental thought which should supervene upon that of marital 
love is jeopardized and lost. The husband may begin to ex- 
amine his own past life and blame himself for real or fancied 
errors and often the whole personality of his wife, body and 
soul, is passed in review. He reflects upon many things that 
he now deeply realizes that h-e should have thought of before, 
of her relatives' pedigree; and her habits, mode of life, and 
regimen are gone over in quest of the cause not only of steril- 
ity, but of each and every defect during gestation and even 
lactation and sometimes drastic, if ignorant, prescriptions are 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 5^9 

urged upon her, while cruder souls may even indulge in bitter 
reproaches. Of course there are, too, unnatural husbands who 
never want children but desire only personal pleasure. Pov- 
erty or even niggardliness or perhaps a sense of their own 
physical or mental unsoundness — each and all of these may 
bring men to this pass, and so may a chronic aversion to the 
noise, care and confusion caused by children. Some of all 
these appear in our questionnaire returns. But, as a whole, 
such types later will and probably should become extinct, and 
as they do not contribute to posterity, they will not here be 
discussed. 

As a rule, the youngest wives are most prone to feel grief 
and loss when they first realize that they are to become 
mothers and the oldest to anticipate pain and danger. This 
is natural and it would seem that the satisfaction is greatest 
near the middle or later twenties. The general sentiment is 
that a longer or shorter period of wedded life should be ex- 
empt during which husband and wife can be all and all to each 
other. This is partly traceable to the prevalence of hyper- 
romantic ideas of love and wedlock favored by modern novel 
reading, but for people maturely nubile it is doubtless a mis- 
take not only for the best interests of posterity but for the 
greatest mutual happiness. Initial excess, if it does not bring 
immediate disenchantment and perhaps aversion, often sows 
the seed of it later^ while the now established average infe- 
riority of firstborn children, when it is just these who ought 
to inherit the full primal vigor of their parents, shows that we 
have wandered from nature's way. It is now practically 
.proven that there is a postmarital decline of reproductive vigor 
which begins very soon after wedlock and that this is later 
followed by a slight rise of its curve corresponding to an ebb 
of excess and that this secondary increase occurs after there 
has been some abatement of the pace set during the first weeks 
or months. 

In many cases the father is now for the first time critically 
judged and his faults realized in fear lest they appear in the 
child. One woman writes : " I now saw clearly that he was a 
scamp and felt that the child of such a man must be born a 
moral cripple. As a husband I thought I loved him, but as a 
father he appeared in a very different light. I should have 



520 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thought of this before, but I was very young (eighteen)." 
Another writes (condensing the substance of a long communi- 
cation) : " He proved to have a loathsome disease and gave it 
to me, so I knew beforehand the child would be tainted. The 
doctors told me the child might take the worst results of the 
disease and leave me better. I thought I ought to want it to 
be the other way and I take it all and let the child go scot 
free, but I could not. My one hope was that I might be well 
whatever befell the child. I had heard that infected men often 
hoped to relieve themselves by imparting their disease to in- 
nocent healthy women, but surely this is the very opposite of 
love. It is the worst and most selfish thing I can think of. 
Why did no one, his doctor or some one else, warn me? Is 
there no vengeance on earth or in heaven for such conduct ? " 
Another says : " My husband was really too old and also too 
exhausted to have children. We both knew it and felt safe 
with our precautions, but my condition was an accident, at 
least he said so and I tried to believe him, but cannot escape 
the thought that perhaps in a moment of weakness he intended 
. it for his greater pleasure." Another says : " I was of a nerv- 
ous temperament and he still more so. Perhaps this similar- 
ity drew us together and made us personally congenial, but 
we thought too little of offspring at first and now I feared my 
child might be insane or idiotic." Another heard after she 
was in this condition that her husband had been dissipated 
before his marriage and so feared the results. Several thought 
now their husbands were disappointed and took less interest in 
them and suspected that they had consoled themselves with 
other women and so realized that they must face the ordeal, 
and life afterwards alone, for love was dead, and one asked 
advice as to what to do. One feared she was too old to go 
through it all. Her husband was young and lusty and had 
already begun to care less for her. Often the fear was ex- 
pressed that the husband would be unable to control himself 
during so long a period and would turn to other loves. Judg- 
ment of the husband, point by point, and self-examination as 
to their own fitness of body and soul were common. Several 
were apprehensive of results of too much previous self-indul- 
gence. " I wanted my husband to be now just a good faithful 
friend who would care for me and whom I could trust and 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 521 

lean on more and more, but he did not fuljfill this wish." One 
wanted all younger women to be made to realize just what 
they would feel when in this condition so that they could judge 
their wooers beforehand by the same standards that loomed up 
now. A few wanted children so ardently and so long in vain 
that they began to suspect themselves or their husbands of 
abnormality, and grew depressed or resentful and suspicious 
according as they thought the fault to be his or their own. 
Waning confidence and love flamed up again when this con- 
dition came. One ascribed all the pains and restraints of this 
stage to her husband. " He knew it all beforehand for he was 
a doctor and I an unsophisticated girl, but he deliberately let 
me go through it all." Another writes : " I wanted a girl be- 
cause I thought his faults would be more likely to be repro- 
duced in a boy." Sometimes when perversion is feared the 
coming mother finds comfort in resolving and planning how 
by regimen beforehand and by nurture afterwards she may 
correct the faults of nature. " If Weismann is right, and noth- 
ing after conception or after birth helps, it is ghastly fatalism, 
and we might as well give up," writes a graduate. Some re- 
view their training at home and in school, and are censorious 
of parents and teachers, surroundings, influences, etc., and one 
studied up all available data of her own and her husband's 
pedigree to forecast the results upon her child. All in all 
then, this state is a great revealer and brings in new interests, 
criteria, standards of judging men, women, education, and 
society. Woman's great function of sex selection in choosing 
the father of her child stands forth in a new light : " Choose as 
you would wish you had when in this condition," is the coun- 
sel several suggest. In savagery and among all civilized races 
we find traces of the idea that pregnant women have divining 
power and that they have new, deeper and truer insights ; and 
all men, even though dimly, feel that now they are being in- 
tuitively examined as before a higher tribunal, and it is this 
that makes unworthy men shrink away and impels the best to 
wholesome introspection and perhaps to resolutions of better- 
ment, more temperance next time, etc. One father confesses 
that now he realized his own errors in the past and tried to 
atone by more tender care and mapped out for himself a new 
sexual regimen in the future. 



522 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Primitive mothers left to themselves in this state seek to 
hide for protection and quiet. They crave solitude, although 
it is for safety rather than for mental realization. They are 
more helpless, and if war, conquest, or rapid flight of the tribe 
comes, they chiefly suffer and may be slain by their captors or 
even by their fellow tribesmen as an incumbrance retarding 
migrations. Otherwise custom may prescribe isolation and 
enforce many taboos of diet and regimen so that women are 
the victims of many a senseless superstition. But even from 
this they often seek escape to be free as all women should be 
more than at any other time. The women about them realize 
better than men that those now awaiting motherhood should be 
a law to themselves, be exempt from many wonted duties and 
granted privileges and immunities. This unaccustomed con- 
dition in communities where woman is still servile, she some- 
times utilizes to the uttermost to impose her will and even her 
whims upon those about her. Often she is thought to be 
prophetic and a seeress. Her new liberty becomes license and 
her spontaneity and fecund fancy now that she is relieved of 
drudgery make her not only the arbiter of her own destiny 
but enable her to enforce her rule upon those about her, for 
she demands homage from all. Even if they do not care for 
her, she feels a sense of power and accepts for herself services 
which she knows are really for her child. If she lacks wisdom 
to guide, she revels in enforcing obedience to her caprices. 
This is one of the choicest prerogatives of her sex. Now for a 
time she is queen at least to her little circle and she gravitates 
by instinct to those who will obey and revere her. She delights 
in being the center of attraction, the object of new interest and 
uses every woman's resource to have her own way and assert 
her sway. She has immunity, too, from injury, for she is not 
punished and can now violate many restraints formerly imposed 
upon her with impunity. In the glorious day of her full-flow- 
ered maidenhood she queened it for herself, but this dominion 
departed when she, was married and appropriated by one, but 
now she can assert her power again in a new way dear to her 
inmost heart because of the child. What are many of the traits 
of hysteria in those childless and unwed but a blind instinct 
to be again a center of interest, a problem to be studied, a mis- 
tress to be obeyed, all without paying the price of pregnancy? 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 523 

The gravid woman's center of interest is transferred to 
new fields and almost transformed. Husband, other children, 
social aims and pets now become secondary. Not a few 
women of laboriously acquired learning and accomplishments 
especially state that their literature, science, learning, music, 
painting, etc., practically cease to exist for them and become 
as vanity, for their psychic stage is set for a more absorbing 
drama in which all these old zests become at best but lay 
figures. Another kind and order of knowledge now comes to 
have chief value and is sought from elderly women, doctors 
and occasionally books, and of this, alas ! for our education of 
girls, most deplored their ignorance, some with bitterness and 
reproaches, for many suffered grievously for lack of elementary 
knowledge. There was censure for parents, friends, teachers, 
schools, and colleges, prudish reticence and of the church. 
" The Catholics are told," said a Protestant. " The poorer 
people of the lower classes know ; but in our circle it was 
thought indelicate to speak of and unfashionable to under- 
stand, so that ignorance where it did not exist was sometimes 
feigned," said in substance a young mother of high social 
position. Should the training we give girls leave them such 
helpless novices in the duties of that period of life when the 
future of the race is so intimately bound up with their well- 
being and their regimen of body and soul? Our few score 
questionnaire returns suggest that the most educated young 
women are most ignorant of the things those who are to be 
mothers most need to know. 

The attitude toward impending pain and danger is in most 
normal cases one of buoyance and hope. There are few or 
no worries partly because these are bad for the child. There 
is no interest in the statistics of death in child-bed or in com- 
plications or operations and little conception of the horrifying 
array of gynecological apparatus, surgical processes, diseases 
and possible abnormal processes, but generally a tranquil and 
almost sublime optimism or indifference and perhaps a positive 
desire to suffer all of it to become more complete thereby, 
which prompts some to refuse narcotics even in prolonged and 
painful labor as better because it is nature's way. Thus, there 
is often a calm heroism that man, who usually knows less of 
pain, wots little of, for women often truly enjoy suffering 



524 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

for those they love and may crave or seek it as something 
needful to their perfection. The body of the gravid mother 
is in a biological sense only the nidjis of the child which 
grows at its expense and in some sense subordinates all its 
powers and functions to its own welfare, and woman's in- 
tuitions respond to this involution for the sake of the evolu- 
tion of the offspring by a deep sense that her decrease, eclipse 
or suffering means its advancement and so she is happy in her 
woe. The world affords no parallel to this algedonism or rap- 
ture of agony. Weal and woe, cross and crown are not an- 
tagonistic to her, but are units underlying her life. Surgical 
operations half as painful or dangerous would appall her far 
more, but the compensation neutralizes the suffering in a way 
which modern aesthetics has no rubrics to explain. Even 
death for something dearer than life is always far closer to 
woman's nature than to man's, and predisposes her when final 
dissolution comes to think of it rather as the birth of her soul 
into a higher life. Hence, self-sacrifice, which is nearer the 
heart of her being than it is to that of man, helps to make her 
more religious and magnifies the patheticism with which the 
New Testament regards life. A religion of only rapture can 
never appeal to woman. It is this inveterate and universal 
experience of her sex that makes it sometimes actually crave 
abuse and cling the closer to those who maltreat her, for to 
be normal and happy she must have her due portion of pain 
and if it does not befall her, she may passionately invent 
misery and simulate grief. Pity is dear to her and is often 
made a substitute for love where this is denied. She often 
exaggerates her pain and possibly most of all those real and 
great ones connected with childbearing, but pity both kindles 
and revives the love of others to her. Hence, if instead of 
counterfeiting she conceals her distress from all, this is so op- 
posed to her instincts that it vastly augments it. 

The sensations of the first movements of the child, which 
constitute an important point in law and have been elaborated 
in folklore, give a sudden definiteness to the sensation of 
motherhood. A new being knocks at the door of life and now 
the maternal consciousness becomes pure. It sometimes brings 
a realization almost startling, and there is a new unique sense 
of subordination of the individual to the race. Some think 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 525 

the foetal movements somewhat oracular, favoring certain 
courses of action and presence, or Hke the Socratic demon 
dissuading or deterring from others. This affects first the 
mother's posture and regimen and may extend to happenings 
in her environment and thus there is such a thing as cyemolatry 
(cyema = foetus). From the energy, frequency, and extent of 
these movements some mothers think the sex of the child can 
be determined before its birth. Some fancy they can distin- 
guish movements of discomfort and even sleepiness and re- 
sentment from those of spontaneous activity for exercise. 
They may be apprehensive that long cessation or abatement of 
them means danger or growing weakness. Some are made 
nervous or even indignant as well as sleepless if movements are 
excessive. Becoming irritable themselves, they fear their child 
will be so. Now it is angry, hungry, sleepy, playful, etc. 
Some fancy or find that its activities and repose depend upon 
theirs. One mother of seven children always foretold the sex 
aright and selected the name in advance, two of which were 
based somewhat upon supposed characteristics from this trans- 
parietal acquaintance. Some even attempt caresses and fancy 
that they are appreciated or perhaps responded to. It is those 
to whom the unborn are most real that can hardly wait 
to hold and behold them. One evidently somewhat neurotic 
young mother imagined her unborn babe so unusually mature 
because of its activity that she thought of trying to procure 
a premature delivery and others have thought their nascent 
offspring precociously ripe and that their small size would 
reduce the pain of confinement. Another anticipated unusual 
pain thinking the child not only oversized but overdue, having 
miskept her time. Besides more deliberate naming, the un- 
born is often thought or even called orally many an endearing 
pet name and talked to as if it could hear and thought and felt 
toward as if it could respond to the psychic approaches of the 
mother. Most young matrons abhor, especially in the early 
and middle stages, every such aspect of the foetus as is repre- 
sented in text-books of embryology, which only women biolo- 
gists and physicians wish to inspect or study, and even the first 
sight of the newborn babe may repel a mother because of its 
larval ugliness. Such popular imagery of the unborn as most 
mothers have is of more mature stages, or of babies of reduced 



526 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

dimensions, or sometimes it is of little pucks, brownies, fairies, 
or tiny Christ children; or, in fine, as something weird or 
charmingly little (for every diminutive is endearing), and the 
place they slumber and grow in is mystic and entranced. Thus, 
here again we meet the same contrast between fact and fancy 
as is seen between the moon of science, cold, arid, and a corpse 
of a world prophetic of what our earth is to be, and the moon 
of romance, of poetry and of lovers. There is a sense in 
which fancy is the truest because most hygienic and optimistic. 
If children come from heaven, it follows that the pelvis is their 
halfway house to earth. 

As many animals and even insects prepare often very 
elaborate nests for their young in advance, so the human 
mother instinctively, even though she be insane and idiotic, 
provides clothing, cradles, cribs, toilet articles, etc. No better 
occupation of both hands and mind is possible. The child 
thus slowly becomes an imaginary companion as the psychic 
keeps pace with the biological bifurcation of one into two per- 
sonalities. Such provision for unborn children should be made 
rather than bought for the educational effect of so doing upon 
the mother, for nothing so steadies her moods and fortifies 
her mind and contributes to make the change from life within 
to that without her body a direct continuum. This experience 
itself contributes something to the proneness of woman to 
think in dialogue rather than monologue and to project her 
soul into the future in a practical way for those she loves. 
We say the animals build blindly, mechanically, prophetically 
for their young, yet without distinct prevision. How the 
stimulus from the womb starts up the nest-building activities, 
whether it is knowledge in the beast or instinct in man that 
anticipates the migration from womb to cradle and the change 
from physiological to psychic functional care, from feeding 
from the blood like an organ of the parental body to mammary 
nutrition, from the warmth and shelter of the pelvis to that 
provided by sewing, from gestation to incubation, from care 
of self to care of baby, is one of the most challenging and 
complex, yet baffling problems of genetic psychology. It is a 
little banal to say that, of old, certain creatures were stimu- 
lated to all kinds of at first purely aimless activities and that 
then certain chance arrangements happened to be more helpful 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 527 

for survival than others, and that these were retained and 
grew apace into all the multifarious kinds of preparation, or 
that this latter proved so economical in conserving the life of 
offspring that less individuals had to be produced and nature 
found it advantageous to detach a certain amount of energy 
from the reproductive processes to the task of making prenatal 
provisions for postnatal needs. What is the relation between 
the impulse to build a nest and that in a mother to prepare a 
wardrobe, or how do the two differ? Each product is an ex- 
tension or a proxy for the parent's body and both are perhaps 
equally well adapted to the purpose. For the only difference 
between them is consciousness. Here this latter becomes insig- 
nificant and problematical, a thing of words, theories, schools 
rather than of life. One may be a trifle more elaborated, 
but just in the degree that it is volitional or planful it becomes 
vacillating and uncertain. The human mother knows that 
something will bud from her body that needs shelter and pro- 
tection to be prepared beforehand, and the bird or animal feels 
the same; and what distinction that has any value can a 
thoroughgoing pragmatism find between them? Surely here 
the difference between conscious and unconscious, between the 
psychological and biological becomes, if not a little imperti- 
nent, only of minimum worth for life and thought. Man's one 
real advantage is that he can profit more by imitation and by 
the social tradition made possible by language, but against this 
must be offset the diminished infallibility of his instincts. 

During parturition, the husband is generally wanted. 
Some very young mothers experience a feeling of shame and 
would banish him. Some want him in the next room ready to 
enter if desired, while others would have him present through- 
out, some to hold their hands, others to assist, etc. Some are 
so conscious of his presence that they cover their face during 
the throes that he may not see the distortions caused by pain, 
smiling at him between times. If his composure or control is 
not fully trusted, he must stay away. Two doctors' wives 
cannot trust their husbands, one on account of his nerves and 
the other because she suspects his knowledge, and two are glad 
he can do it all and no strange professional is necessary. The 
selection of medical aid is usually left to him and women rare- 
ly ask that provision be made for possible exceptional 



528 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

emergencies and are alarmed if he does so. If present, the 
husband must be passive and complaisant, and if there is the 
least danger that he may attempt to assert his authority or to 
prescribe any items of conduct to nurse, doctor, or wife, he is 
at once persona non grata. The wife's consent to have him 
present is no doubt partly that he may see how she suffers for 
him and for the child, and that this supreme object lesson of 
devotion and self-sacrifice, which is the noblest thing in wom- 
anhood, may not only touch his sympathy and arouse his grati- 
tude and appreciation, but increase his love. Thus, there is 
an ingredient, however small, of tact and diplomacy in her de- 
sire for his presence. Whatever tenderness he was made to 
feel for her condition before, now reaches its maximum and 
his realization of what it all means may not come amiss in the 
future. 

The first sight of the baby, especially to young and inex- 
perienced mothers, is disappointing and several even say 
" disgusting." One avers that she thought she never could 
love " that yellow ugly bundle " and wanted it taken away. 
Her ideals of infantile beauty had been so romantic that she 
half expected to see a cherub or holy bambino with a halo as 
in pictures. In abnormal cases, this aversion may intensify 
into a hate and spite that can never be overcome and the 
mother may be dangerous to the child. It may require hours 
or days until the child can be held in the arms and nursed 
when touch sometimes seems to conquer sight. The vast 
majority of mothers in our returns, however, long for the first 
glimpse of their darling, are intensely happy and can hardly 
wait for the bath and dressing to be over to clasp it. Some 
say that they wish to see if it is sound and well formed and to 
relieve their anxiety upon this point. The first glimpse is 
often supremely delightful. Tininess itself constitutes an ir- 
resistible appeal and so does helplessness, and there are tears 
of joy, and some can hardly wait till their milk has fully come 
to nurse it. It is all their very own, flesh of their flesh and 
they have little pangs that others must even touch it. A few 
begrudge even a sight of it at first, but most want all their 
friends to see and are proud at every expression of admiration 
or interest. It must above all be protected and cuddled, if not 
fondled, and their kisses are " as delicate as a zephyr and as 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 529 

rapturous as heaven itself." Only when it is resting by their 
side can they rest after all they have been through, and much 
as they need to sleep they v^ake at the slightest stir or sound, 
so intimate is now the new external rapport. Now they have 
it in the objective world where they can lavish all their care 
upon it directly and can do for it, and not merely diet, rest, and 
follow certain regimens for its indirect benefit. 

The first cry is usually awaited with some anxiety, for it 
means life, while its absence is death. To a few very young 
mothers, the note seems harsh and repellent or sets the nerves 
aquiver like a shrilling dissonance. Some in this tense state 
weep because it seems to them so hoarse, uncanny or persistent 
and are perhaps laughed into smiling by those about the bed- 
side. Most, however, find it rapturous and rejoice if it is loud 
because this betokens vigor and health. They know their 
labor is accomplished and that now they are indeed real 
mothers. Some describe their feelings as predominantly pity. 
" The poor little stranger will have much to suffer in this 
world on the shores of which it is cast like a shipwrecked 
mariner by angry waves." " I knew the voice and lungs were 
good and that was enough for me." " I thought it was in 
pain or wanted something and so I felt I must bestir myself, 
but did not know what to do." " When I first heard it cry, 
I sank back feeling that so far all was well." " Then I could 
pray with a heart full to overflowing with gratitude." " It 
was the sweetest sound I ever heard and I was delirious and 
almost hysterical with joy." " I felt it a call or summons to 
me to do my whole duty by it, for it needed me." 

One of the first and fondest desires of a young mother's 
heart is to see the baby in her husband's arms. In former 
ages this meant that he acknowledged it to be his as well as 
hers, and not only in ancient Rome but in many a savage tribe 
it is a formal act of adoption, signifying before witnesses that 
the father owns his child. To most mothers now it means a 
new and higher bond of union, that they are now not only man 
and wife but joint parents. Some mothers are somewhat 
fastidious and exacting and want him to hold and perhaps kiss 
it first and then to place it in their own arms as if presenting 
it to them as a kind of boon for what they have suffered and 
accomplished in getting him an heir. It is a moment when 
35 



530 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

impressions, even of details, are indelible and our returns upon 
this point are minute. The husband is relieved of long, and 
perhaps only with difficulty concealed, anxiety for two, and if 
the child is lusty he has good reason to be proud of himself as 
well as of his wife and of the new scion of his house. He is 
very conscious of his new dignity and likes all his friends to 
know of it despite the occasional chaffing to which he may be 
subject. The disfavor with which female friends may have 
regarded him before and during the confinement is gone and 
he shares in their congratulations. However deeply he may 
sympathize with his wife, he can at first with the best good 
will do but little to assist in the ministrations. His visits to 
the nursery are welcome if rightly timed and if he deports 
himself properly, but he must not meddle and can only look 
on. The full realization of his parenthood now grows apace, 
but the mother's sense of hers had long antedated his. 

I append in usually greatly condensed form typical cases 
from my collection of one hundred, showing the psychic reac- 
tions of mothers to this most tender and sacred of the experi- 
ences of maternity. 

Married at twenty ; written at twenty-seven ; two children. For 
five months I had no hope and cried hours at a time ; was very angry 
at my husband who said we were happier as it was, at least for a time 
without the noise and care. I said, " you are happy, but I married 
in order to have children and am miserable." I loved dolls as a 
child and was never tired of caring for my younger brothers and 
sisters. When I was sure I was to be a mother, I could hardly sleep 
at first for joy, wanted to tell a sister of seven and thought she ought 
to know. Mother, and especially grandmother, told me all their 
experience and that of all others they knew. My husband said nice 
things, but was unhappy that I could go out less with him and had 
many ideas about exercise, diet, reading, and everything. I now 
seemed to step out of real life, wanted more seclusion and narrowed 
the circle of my friends. There was some loneliness. I loved to sit 
in the garden with flowers or in the woods and think. I began to 
love the child that was to be with all my mind, might, and strength. 
I thought it would be a boy with golden hair, and gave him many pet 
names, although preferring Henry, v/hich was that of my lost baby 
brother. I knew there would be pain and danger, but I loved to 
contemplate both because they would glorify my motherhood and 
make it complete. My husband's sisters had died in childbirth and 
my husband was anxious and afraid, but tried to conceal it. This I 
thought to be dislike to my condition and was much troubled by it. 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 53^ 

I felt that I belonged entirely to my child and so wanted to live and 
be well. I desired my husband to love the baby no less than me and 
feared he would not. My life grew far richer, more complete; all 
my girlish much-praised beauty was gone, but I cared not. I pitied 
childless women more and more. Once I expressed my sympathy 
with a beautiful but childless society woman who replied that she 
could not endure the noise and disorder of children, and I have ever 
since felt a deep-seated dislike for her and she for me. I tried to 
control my moods and temper, to live ideally for the child's sake. 

Married at twenty-three ; written at forty ; five children. There 
were three years of dull, dreary, lonely waiting. As soon as I knew, 
I first wanted my mother; loved my husband not less but differently 
and with a certain reserve as if there had been fulfillment and now 
there was nothing but harvest. I lost my sallowness and my friends 
said I had bloomed like a rose. I loved to sit in my room and was 
for the first time glad my husband had his own occupation, his 
friends, cards, club, so I could be by myself. He was a bit worried 
and sometimes scolded 'because my regimen was not what he thought 
right. I took new delight in the society of elderly women and in 
seeing how ardently most of them shared my gladness and how care- 
ful and full of advice they were for me. I felt I had stepped over 
the threshold of a nobler life, tried not to worry, was proud and 
always thought as I belonged to my baby now, I must do and be my 
best. I wanted my child to be the brightest, handsomest, happiest, 
healthiest ever, and his name was to be Felix. I hoped the worst 
qualities of my husband would not develop in my child for then I 
knew a wall would arise between us and I wanted to see rather all 
his best traits and thus only should I want more children. In fact, 
I grew apart from my husband and took all my comfort more and 
more with my children who, by dint of years of care, have so far 
developed well. 

Married at twenty-two ; written at thirty-three ; two children. I 
rejoiced greatly and grew indifferent to all but husband and baby, 
but was excitable and nervous ; loved my home, children, and nature 
more ; wanted all the pain, but was weary waiting so long. Many 
friends became indifferent to me. My husband was wild with joy. 
He tried to conceal his worry on account of my delicate health, 
but I slowly grew stronger and felt that he would not let me die. 
I kept busy and took on more rather than less duties ; feared ttiy 
husband would love the child more than he did me; felt impelled to 
tell all my young women friends much that I was learning and to 
break through the absurd conventional restraints of false, mock 
modesty that they might love this state and know more about it 
beforehand than I did. 

Married at eighteen ; written at twenty- four ; three children. I was 
young and was not glad, for I thought all my freedom was gone; I 
had lived and seen so little ! I was so ashamed I wanted to run away 
from home and husband to my parents ; cried much ; did not want to 



532 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

move but to lie on the sofa and tried not to think ; hoped long that it 
was not true ; hated company and especially strangers ; wanted to be 
in some far and unknown place ; felt sure I should die ; thought little 
or nothing of the child at first. My married sister pitied and con- 
soled me, but I felt it was all unjust. I was beautiful, but inex- 
perienced; had expected great joy in getting out of the convent 
school into the world. My husband was twenty years older, affec- 
tionate and talked much of my duty. Why did my mother let me 
learn to dance and flirt only to have to leave the gay world after just 
a glimpse of it? God help me, I sometimes hated my dear husband 
and could not bear his presence in the same room at night for a mo- 
ment. He preached the philosophy of maternity, how needful it was 
for completeness and I abhorred his doctrine, but now see he was 
right. I had spells of vowing I would never bear the child for him, 
but could think of no practical way of escape. I had many caprices, 
not only about foods but about him. 

Married at seventeen years and six months ; written at twenty- 
three; two children. Was distressed that I could not go to balls, 
theatres, parties ; was cross at my husband, who was free to go about 
the world as usual. I wanted to run away and hide ; thought a great 
deal about my girlhood, home, flowers, birds, shopping, singing, and 
everything, and every experience there kept going through my mind ; 
thought nothing about the child; loved my old nurse, who cried with 
me and said I was a poor martyr; felt very forlorn; retired and rose 
late, doing nothing all day ; liked all sour and sweet things, and 
feigned queer appetites for foods I never tasted, and did it out of 
spite or mischief; could never sleep in the dark; disliked all my old 
gowns, dresses, and got new ones; took occasion of the new spirit 
of kindness toward me to ask for various and many presents, for I 
knew now I would get about all I wanted. I hoped for a girl so I 
could dress her up beautifully and take her to balls. My chief fear 
was that the child would not be beautiful, for I would hate it if any- 
thing was the matter ; was always at cross purposes with my husband, 
but ajl is well now. 

Married at twenty-five; written at thirty-three; one child. Was 
happy because my husband loved me more and took great pleasure in 
preparing clothes and things ; narrowed my circle to those nearest and 
dearest; could not bear the presents of anyone of whose good will 
and love I was not certain; wanted and prayed for a girl to be a 
matron and bear children for my fatherland (Poland) ; named her 
in advance Victoria, and hoped she might be a Jeanne d'Arc and 
free us from Russia. It was a boy. Among other things, prayed 
that if I died, the child might die with me, and not be an orphan; 
was tranquil and content, always trying to do nothing not best for 
it; wished I knew more; felt sure it would be a superior child and 
felt myself superior to other women. It was hard to adjust to con- 
ventional modesty which forbids us to talk freely and openly about 
all such things about which our whole life and mind centers. The 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX ~ 533 

first movements were a great event which I shall never forget. I 
knew then it would be strong and vigorous, and so got a bit ac- 
quainted with its disposition beforehand. 

Married at twenty-eight; written at thirty; one child. Glad but 
feared I should die, and my husband's sensitive nature constantly 
troubled me ; feared he would not realize why I must turn away from 
him for rest. I looked younger and fresher in color than ever. I 
longed for my own room at home, and to have my child there alone. 
I had never known my father, and perhaps for this reason wanted my 
child all to myself. I gave her long in advance the name she now 
bears ; tried to live hygienically ; thought my husband very egotistic ; 
feared my child would love me less because it must love him too. I 
was a pianist and taught before marriage and longed to give my 
daughter lessons. My husband was so disturbed as my term ap- 
proached that he fell ill. He loved me too much. I feared his nerves 
might be inherited, and so liked him less. Possibly I took more 
care of myself because I knew he loved me, but I did not want him 
around at all. 

Married at twenty-two ; written at thirty ; three children. Full of 
mingled hope, shyness, and shame ; was glad I had such a nice home 
and room. My husband was always getting and doing things, but 
seemed a little conscious and almost ashamed of it, as though his ten- 
derness were unmanly. Especially in the presence of my mother he 
was sometimes disagreeable, I thought, in order to hide his feelings. 
I believe I would rather have died than to have my child die, but I 
never before so wanted to live so as to care for it. It was very real 
to me and had many pet names. I was much interested in my own 
new states of mind; felt exalted above others; condemned the cus- 
toms of society that prevent women from keeping their own primitive 
souls. The first of the manifestations of new life excited me, but 
the prenatal movements gave me quite an insight into the nature of 
the child. 

Married at twenty-three ; written at twenty-nine ; three children. 
Had always greatly loved little children and was glad ; was very tired 
of caresses, and loved to be alone more and more, and was inclined 
to melancholy, would go to the public garden and sit by the hour to 
watch children. It was to be Angelina; all must suffer, and so I 
was resigned and resolved not to take any narcotics, but wanted to 
bear all the mother's burden and should love it more for the suffer- 
ing and it would love me the more for it. My sister was a spinster, 
and thought I should shut myself out of society, and called my condi- 
tion " indecent and disgusting," and the younger sister, aged nine- 
teen, pretended not to understand, but was red and annoyed at my 
presence. Later she told me and was much ashamed. My husband 
grew very serious and tried to pet me in new ways, but I was un- 
grateful. I grew ambitious to have as many children as my mother 
(nine), but that was foolish for me, we were so poor and all would 
have to work harder and we must scrimp and pinch still more. I 



534 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

know, however, that our dear country needs more native-born peo- 
ple, and should not be so dependent for its increase upon immigrants. 

Married at twenty-one; written at fifty; five children. It was 
with great grief that I realized that I loved my firstborn more before 
birth than I did for some weeks after. The first aspect disillusioned 
me, for I had high ideals. I have had no such experience with my 
later children. My first love toward the child awoke suddenly at its 
first movement when it came to be a reality for me. The movements 
often pained me, yet I loved to feel them, to caress the unborn child, 
and think how tenderly I would care for it after its birth. I am not 
sure whether painlessness at birth would be best, but of course in a 
way I would prefer it, though not at the expense of the child, nor 
would I lose harmony with the experience of all mothers or with 
full maternity. My husband would and wanted to lighten all my 
burdens, but I had to work to keep myself occupied and well. He 
had a look and mien of the sinner who is repentant and wanted to 
do penance, and this made me love him more. I felt I must smoke 
cigars, and in the fifth month I did, and have ever since loved cig- 
arettes. I was so busy that I had no time to read the literature on 
maternity which my friends gave me and literature and art which 
I had loved before, no longer existed for me. My husband seemed 
fastidious, and later began discords about our plans for the children, 
which increased as they grew up and ceased only when each had de- 
veloped his own way, which was in every respect different from the 
wishes and designs of either of us. I was full of ambition that my 
children should be the best in the world. Childless women seemed 
so stupid and inferior that I almost thought that all ought to have 
children sans peche et sans mari, but this is absurd and wicked and 
perhaps it is almost an insane thought. My first experiences of wed- 
lock were a great shock to my modesty, and so again were nature's 
arrangements for gestation, but I know now how beautiful all is. 

Married at twenty-four; written at thirty; two children. Was sim- 
ply cross at the prospect of the expense. I was very irritable, the more 
so that I was not understood ; was very ill, hungry, and overworked ; 
longed and pined for quiet, rest, but could get neither; wanted a 
girl, because it is harder to raise a son. My husband smoked in our 
rooms, but tobacco as well as perfumery made me sick. I just had 
to buy and once to steal apples to eat on the street. Pregnancy does 
not elevate, but it degrades and drags us down, but children must be 
born. I could not help feeling resentment toward my husband, and 
quarrels were frequent. No doubt my disposition did affect my child 
unfavorably. 

Married at nineteen; written at twenty-four; three children. Glad, 
but dreaded loss of freedom ; feared I did not know enough to be a 
good mother ; had never seen much of children ; was pleased that my 
husband revered me like a saint ; often rose, sobbed hysterically about 
the house at night. For my first child, wanted to be out-of-doors, but 
for my last preferred my own room where I had loved to arrange 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 535 

bright curtains, paper flowers, have sunshine, etc. ; had various pets, 
but cared less for these now; never thought about my children be- 
fore they were born. Noise, i. e., that of the town, was very dis- 
tressing ; shunned all strangers, abhorred milk, wine, pork, soup, and 
cheese, but had no cravings. " In heart, soul, thought, and endeavor, 
I am better and nobler and more womanly, and but for false educa- 
tion all true women would know that their really supreme end and 
aim in life was to be mothers." 

Married at twenty; written at twenty-six; four children. Was a 
little repelled by my husband's new tenderness, which I at first did not 
understand. I thought my first would be a boy, and named it long 
in advance after a national hero. I developed a new dislike of young 
flirting girls, who seemed to me silly and giddy; was grateful that 
my husband showed no anxiety even if he felt it. I was an orphan 
and reveled now in the sense of more truly belonging to some one, and 
at the prospect of having for the first time some one to cherish and 
who belonged to and depended upon me. I became less egotistic, 
capricious, humble, devout, and realized that there are others. These 
months, indeed, cured many of the worst faults of my girlish disposi- 
tion. 

Married at twenty-one; written at twenty-three; one child; was 
immensely ashamed and wanted to hide ; was constantly sick, unhappy, 
ugly in form, face, and temper. My husband, I thought, cares only 
for the baby and not for me. Hence, I was extremely sour. At first 
I felt in a nasty way that I did not own myself, but was a slave. All 
my husband brought to or did for me was very displeasing. I hated 
every allusion to my condition ; felt that I was a creature kept and 
held for bearing children and that all that pertained and was done 
for me was in fact done for the child. It would be a boy, either a 
poet, painter, or singer; I would travel with it far away from them 
all. It should be mine and not theirs. " Why are we women not told 
of the truth? How dreadful are the first days of married life, and 
why does the first child come as a stranger that we do not know how 
to take care of? It is this that makes marriage so often a great dis- 
appointment." 

Married at twenty-three; written at twenty-seven; two children. 
Felt that all I imagined and thought influenced the child, and so lived 
for it ; was especially shy toward my husband, who became simply a 
friend; lost forever and rather suddenly all my usual gayety as a girl 
and became serious, fussed much with my room by way of prepara- 
tion ; thought of the child as my own, and called it deary, sonny, etc., 
in my musings and soliloquies; tried to keep well for its sake; felt 
less my own, and it was a sweet feeling. I read religious books and 
prayed much, and never felt so near to heaven and God. I hoped 
to be chastened and better and more fit to live and die for Jesus; 
thought my child whatever it is will be an " angel to me," but did 
not think or care so much how it would compare with others. My 
mother had taught me, so that I married feeling it my chief duty to 



536 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

bear and train children. The more of us there are in the country, 
the greater the country, so that we have a holy mission. For this 
destiny every girl should be prepared. 

Married at twenty-five; written at thirty-four; five children. Felt 
proud; was happiest with the later children. We are very poor, but 
I welcomed the added labor and care. My first child especially was 
a very real being to me almost from the start; was loved most, but 
there would be other children. I longed constantly for it to be large, 
sound, well built. My husband was needlessly anxious about every 
change of my moods. He should have been better instructed, and 
have allowed me to feel any way I wanted. I expected he would 
love the child more than me, but this made me happy, for it was ours. 

Married at thirty-one; written at thirty-four; two children. After 
years of waiting I was inexpressibly rejoiced, though miserably ill 
throughout, and my husband, who had been unhappy, became far 
dearer and closer to me again. I loved home, garden, yet better, 
because all these would mean so much to my child. I would bear 
any pain and even die for such a prize. I felt a double responsibility 
and built castles for the future. I saw many beautiful pictures, and 
enjoyed them, too; realized how the Holy Mother felt, and my 
thoughts fluctuated, now fearing and now thinking that every possi- 
ble excellence would come. 

Married at twenty ; written at forty-one ; six children. As a child 
I always wanted and expected a baby of my own, and when, after six 
months of marriage, there was no sign, I thought of adopting one. 
My chief fears were with the first. When I knew, I wanted to tell 
everybody, and the joy of making and handling the garments was 
exquisite. During the fourth and fifth months I cried at trifles, but 
in the last few months was already happy, for the movements gave 
me an exquisite sense of companionship, and I could hardly wait to 
clasp it. When the later children were coming, I took the first into 
my confidence, and they felt the keenest yet secretly sacred pleasure 
of feeling it under my heart. This brought us all nearer together. 
I shrank from those of my friends who think this practice wrong. 
I wanted all things to be as natural as possible, and welcomed the 
pain. I did not want to die rather than the child, for there were pos- 
sibilities of others. In everything I belonged to that baby, and noth- 
ing could disturb my serenity. I longed above all else to be natural. 
It is a kind provision of nature that childless women do not know 
what they miss. I could usually tell the sex by the movements. 

My long doll play predisposed me to long for real children, and 
my study of medicine strengthened this desire, and gave me confi- 
dence, for I knew I was stronger and better in health than the aver- 
age. It made me appreciate, understand, love, and turn to my mother 
because I could realize what she had been and done for me. I be- 
came more unselfish and realized the great law of sacrifice. I was 
better in health, welfare, and my habitual headaches vanished. My 
spirits were sky high. I did not avoid publicity, but rather courted 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 537 

it, being proud of my condition, and wanting all to know it. The 
child was a very real personality. I had two names in advance, that 
of his paternal grandfather, and the other a secret pet name. I 
thought much about my ancestry and that of my husband, for I was 
interested in heredity; was more charitable and humanistic. If my 
husband was absorbed, I realized that he felt the added responsibility, 
care, and expense of what was coming. In the middle of my term, 
all my senses, especially smell and taste, were more acute and saliva- 
tion was increased. This passed after the fourth month. I feared 
my husband would think I was going to love the child more than I 
did him. My states of mind were so new they became very inter- 
esting to me, and they seemed so far superior to those of old that I 
seemed to be a new personality. Conventionality prevents most from 
enjoying to the full, as they should, this new condition, and making 
it a common topic of friendly intercourse. 

Was fearful I was not capable of performing the full physiolog- 
ical function of molding a new life perfectly. I lived more in my 
affections, and wanted to widen out and not to contract my circle 
of acquaintance, wishing all to see and know. Save only to those 
who pitied me I felt that everything pertaining to my state was too 
sacred for words. A real personality was the chief thing, although 
I thought I could understand better and do more for a girl. I could 
be content anywhere. My husband's state of mind controlled my own 
more than formerly. I tried to think and feel ideally, for I loved 
this condition, and found it extremely interesting and pleasant, and 
instead of feeling resentment toward him felt more gratitude. 

I turned more to my husband, and from nearly all others ; was 
greatly depressed, and thought a great deal about suicide, and the 
different methods. I left off corsets, reconstructed my wearing 
apparel and my sleeping and eating habits, and allowed myself cer- 
tain indulgences to which I did not usually feel myself privileged, and 
thought even my own standards might now be let down. I realized 
painfully that the experiences of confinement were a fatality not to 
be evaded, and toward the latter part my feelings were rather those 
of triumph and exaltation. Some of my friends have had intense 
aversion toward both husband and child, but this feeling usually 
passes away after birth. 

Dr. D. H. Sherman ^ says that the psediatrist can do far 
more than has usually been thought in aiding the premature 
infant to live. Subcutaneous fat is supplied during the last 
month or two of gestation so that in the premature child this 
is lacking and the heat radiation is very great. Moreover, it 
lacks power to produce heat because of its imperfectly ex- 

* The Premature Infant. N. Y. Med. Jour., Aug. 5, 1905, pp. 272-276. 



538 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

panded lungs, its feeble metabolism, its inability to exercise, 
and because the liver is changing its function of blood forma- 
tion to the manufacture of bile. During the last month of 
pregnancy iron is being stored up in excess to prepare for the 
small quantity of it to be supplied in breast milk later. During 
the last week or two of intra-uterine life, the salts of potassium 
are being rapidly stored up. So the digestive ferments are less 
effective than in full term. Although pepsin is present in the 
stomach, pancreatin and perhaps trypsin are active. Great are 
the dangers of atelectasis, and the partially developed alveoli 
are badly supported. The foramen of the heart is too wide 
open and there is often cyanosis. Very often the infant is too 
weak to draw food from either breast or bottle. Premature 
infants seem more liable to infections, perhaps especially 
through the umbilicus. It is possible, however, to develop a 
premature child about as well as one born at the full term, al- 
though the old idea that a seven months' infant is more apt 
to live than an eight months' child has no basis in fact. The 
cautions to be observed are very many and great. It is not, 
however, necessary, as is so often thought, that the age of the 
wetnurse should be related to that of the child. By great care 
in feeding, bathing, regulating temperature of the incubator, 
children weighing three pounds or even less have developed 
into vigorous and healthful life. 

Nearly every State has enacted stringent laws against 
infanticide and foeticide as well as laws enforcing the father's 
responsibility for his illegitimate offspring. The father in- 
stinct conscious of its parental duty is forcibly expressed by 
the penalties provided for those who desert their families. In 
forty-eight out of fifty-three American States and territories, 
including Alaska, Porto Rico, and Hawaii, action can be 
brought under criminal law for desertion and nonsupport of 
family. In the remainder, there is (January, 1907) no legis- 
lation upon the subject. The term of imprisonment for this 
crime ranges from ten days to three years and the fines from 
ten to one hundred dollars. Desertion of children with intent 
to abandon them utterly is punished in twenty-six States by 
fines ranging from $250 to $1,000 and imprisonment from six 
months to two years. 

Interesting statistics have been collected by the Charity 



THE PEDAGOGY OF SEX 539 

Organization Society of New York which show that out of 
323 cases of family desertion with definite cause assignable, 
100 of the men left just before or after the birth of a child. 
Very often the deserting father came back later to wife and 
children until this cause of desertion occurred again. In these 
cases, the conjugal was stronger than the parental feeling, or 
attachment to the woman as wife stronger than the feeling for 
the child, since the former caused him to come home again 
after the desertion, and the latter caused him to leave again. 
Such guilty fathers are absolutely lacking not only in all sense 
of paternal instinct but in their obligation to society. Cross- 
ing a State line should not put them out of the powers of 
the law. 

In nearly every State and practically throughout the world 
legislation is wholly in the hands of men. About 13,000,000 
men in the United States twenty years of age and over are 
fathers or about twice as many as are celibate. In forty-two 
States the father has a legal control of the children. This is 
a survival of the custom which dominated primitive folk and 
was legalized in Greece and in Rome where even the power of 
life and death was vested in him. Three States fix the age 
of ten, sixteen that of twelve; sixteen is a common age and 
two States fix it at twenty-one, but in general the age limit is 
fourteen. In six States there is no limit to the number of 
hours in which minors may be kept at work. Eleven of the 
States that have provided child-labor laws have not (1907) 
reenforced or supplemented them with the laws of compelling 
school attendance. In eight of our States, according to Roark, 
there is no age limit for the protection of children against 
the greed of parents and employers. But we here transcend 
even the larger pedagogy of sex. 



CHAPTER VIII 

INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 

The present fearful waste of pubescents — Very few children have intel- 
lectual interests — Industrial training in the old guilds — Arts and 
crafts movement — Causes of the decline of the apprentice system — 
Its relation to labor unions — Description of a score of new types of 
industrial schools — The Munich system described and criticised — 
Failure of manual training — A proposed substitute for it — Making of 
toys and simple scientific apparatus — Correlation of industrial train- 
ing with race history — How the former should stimulate reading — 
Relations to puppet theaters — Interest in firearms, tops, kites, and 
airships — Vocational bureaus — Educational advantage of utility — Our 
system undemocratic — Stress on industrial environrnxCnt — Need of a 
book on the leading trades — Our industrial life imperiled — Reduction 
of natural resources — A substitute for military training — Commercial 
education — Business schools and colleges — Trade, general ; skilled 
labor, special — Education for the former — Nature study and agri- 
culture — Industrial education of girls — Difficulties of the problem — 
New departures — Domestic versus trade training — The German 
kitchen, clothes, children, church. 

Next to moral education, to which the last few chapters 
have been devoted, industrial training is by general consent 
the greatest and most urgent problem confronting the Ameri- 
can people. Its dimensions, complexities, and difficulties are 
even greater than those most interested have yet begun to 
realize. The vast majority of American children now leave 
school near the dawn of adolescence, just when the soul is 
most docile and eager, and when education in all the past has 
begun. It is precisely this nascent and most educable period 
that under present conditions we fail to reach, and until we do 
so, our entire scheme is hollow at heart. The decay of the 
apprentice system, the general uselessness of boys and girls 
under new city conditions, the specialization of industry, the 
utter inadequacy of the manual training movement of the last 
quarter century to cope with the present situation, the fact 
540 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 541 

that the best provisions here and there made reach but an in- 
significant fraction of the children needing them — make a 
grave situation involving inestimable moral and economic 
waste, the realization of which now threatens to seriously 
abate the faith of our people in education, upon which the en- 
tire scheme of public instruction rests. Our land and our age 
are industrial. The prime condition of citizenship and of self- 
respect is the power of self-support. From all this our school 
system as a whole has held itself aloof. Happily, however, 
a great awakening has begun. Let us first consider : 

The Present Tragic Wastage of Piihescents. — This most 
educable stage of life is now most neglected. This means 
decay at the very heart of our educational system, the very best 
test of which is what it does with that enthusiasm of youth 
which is nature's best gift to man. What is the situation? 
There are now some 18,000,000 school children in the United 
States. If they were placed in a compact line, giving a foot 
to each, Schneider ^ computes they would extend from the 
northeast of Maine in a solid row to the west coast of South- 
ern California, i. e., from sea to sea on the longest diameter 
of the country. Those who pass through the high school 
would reach only across California. Some 17,000,000 
drop out of school as soon as or before the law permits. 
Ayres ^ studied the enrollment of 886 cities of 8,000 popula- 
tion or more, based on the report of the Commissioner of 
Education for 1907, and finds that of 1,000 pupils entering the 
first grade, 462 will enter the sixth, 189 the high school, from 
which 152 will graduate. Thorndike ^ finds that very few 
stop before 12, but that of 100 in the school at 9 years of age, 
9 leave at twelve, 18 at 13, 23 at 14, 17 at 15, 14 at 16, 8 at 
17. Most drop out from 13 to 15 feeling that the school is 
not vital. The Commissioner of Education reports in 1908 
that the high school enrollment was 4.6 per cent of the total 
public and private school enrollment; that the number of 

* Hermann Schneider. Partial Time Trade Schools. Annals of Amer. Acad. 
of Pol. and Soc. Sci., 1909, vol. 33, pp. 50-55. 

^ Ayres, Leonard P. Laggards in Our Schools. See p. 13. N. Y., Charities 
Publication Committee, 1909. 236 p. 

^ Thorndike, Edward L. The Elimination of Pupils from School. Washington, 
Gov't Print. OiSce, 1908. 63 p. 



542 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

students in public universities and colleges, professional and 
normal schools was f of i per cent of the total enrollment 
of the public school, including higher educational institutions ; 
and that the enrollment in public and private universities, col- 
leges, professional and normal schools was 1.5 per cent of the 
total enrollment of public and private schools.^ D. E. Haw- 
kins ^ estimated that in the public schools of the United States 
each pupil attended on the average 5^ years of 200 days each. 
The average compulsory attendance found, for all states hav- 
ing compulsory laws, is 7.2 years of from 8 to 40 weeks each. 
Of the total public school population from 5 to 18, only 70 
per cent are enrolled, including private schools. The average 
daily attendance is only about ^ of the public school popula- 
tion. Another estimate is that about ^ of the public school 
children of our cities leave school by or before the close of 
the fifth grade. 

Several more special censuses confirm and illustrate the con- 
clusion that the percentage of withdrawal is very great. Kingsbury 
reports for the Massachusetts Commission that 25,000 children be- 
tween 14 and 16 in the state are not in school and are either idle or 
at work. Of these J only had completed the grammar grades, ^ 
had finished the seventh, and | the sixth grade. Of 8,567 children 
entering the first grades of the Cincinnati pubHc schools, only 447 
were left at the age of 14, when the law permits them to leave. 
C. S. Howe, of the Case School in Cleveland, says that 80 per cent 
of the boys of the grammar school do not finish the eighth grade, 
and that most of them enter the ranks of unskilled labor, and esti- 
mates that about i per cent of the enrollment of the elementary 
schools graduate from the high school. ^ Of 1,650 pupils entering the 
first grade of the public school in Albany, 500 reach the eighth 
grade and 150 the twelfth. Superintendent Bogan, of the Chicago 
Vocational School, states that the Board of Education found that 
nearly 3,300 boys between the ages of 14 and 16 were neither work- 
ing nor attending school.* F. A. Vanderlip says there are 10,000,000 
youth from 15 to 20 in the United States, and that 7,500,000 of them 
are not in school, and so urges continuation schools. The educa- 
tional department of the international committee of the Y. M. C. A. 
concludes that only about 5 per cent of the 13,000,000 young men 

^ U. S. Commissioner of Education, Report, 1908, vol. i, p. 27. 
^ Report of the Syracuse Chamber of Commerce, Jan., 1908. p. 23. 
^ Western Journal of Education, vol. 13, p. 266. See also E. E. Brown: Govern- 
ment by Influence. N. Y., Longmans, 1910. 245 p. See p. 158 et seq. 
* Western Journal of Education, vol. 13, p. 266. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 543 

of the country from 21 to 35 had received in school any preparation 
for their occupation; that only about 8 per cent of those who 
graduated from the elementary schools entered the professions or 
commercial life, while most of the remaining 92 per cent took up 
some form of industry for a living. In England over 2,000,000, and 
in Massachusetts over 40,000 between the ages of 12 and 17 have 
no educational care.^ The boy who goes to work attends school 
on the average 5 years, while those who enter the professions spend 
from, 16 to 20 years in preparation. Our public schools give great 
attention to the 2,000,000 professional people, and none worthy the 
name to the 30,000,000 people engaged in industrial pursuits.^ It is 
believed that about 4,000,000 young people now leave school in this 
country to enter industry each year with no preparation for their 
work. More do so in textile than in commercial centers. J. W. 
Van Cleave (President of the National Association of Manufactur- 
ers) estimates, as to the general distribution of occupations, that of 
the breadwinners of the United States, 36 per cent are in agriculture 
and fisheries, 24 per cent in manufacturing and mining, 16 per cent 
in trade and commerce, and 4 per cent in the professions and the 
public service. Another estimate is that of those who work for pay 
in this country : 85 per cent are in industry and commerce, and our 
schools give practical preparation for about 3.5 per cent. In 1895 
it was calculated that only about i in 60 entering these employments 
receives anything like adequate vocational training. E. S. Barney ^ 
estimates that in New York City about ■^^j per cent of the adult male 
population are engaged in mechanical work, 37 per cent in business, 
91 per cent in domestic service, and 5 per cent in the learned pro- 
fessions. 

Such statistics based on data computed by various meth- 
ods, and more that could be cited, reveal the general situa- 
tion. We must face these facts and draw the lessons which 
they teach. They are : 

First, that we have paid relatively vastly too much atten- 
ion to the few who go on to secondary and higher technical, 
liberal and professional education, and have wastefully, not to 
say disgracefully, neglected the needs of the masses of our 
children and youth. If we have a good ladder up which the 
child of the gutter or of the Ghetto can climb to the univer- 
sity, our system is nevertheless radically undemocratic, in that 

1 Sadler, M. E. Eng. Educational Review, Feb., 1905. 

^ Herter, S. L. Carpentry and Building, vol. 30, p. 94. See also O. I. Wood- 
ley. Industrial Education. N. E. A. Report, 1909, pp. 312-316. 

^ Barney, E. S. Intermediate Industrial Schools as a Requirement of a Program 
of Industrial Education. N. E. A. Report, 1908, pp. 793-798. 



544 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

we give too exclusive care to those on the upper rungs and 
are so indifferent to the great majority who would drop off 
from the lower ones. There is a chasm between our educa- 
tional and our industrial system. J. F. McGlory (President 
of the Consolidated Car Heating Company of Albany) found 
that of 1 02 workmen, many of whom were mechanics of high 
intelligence, not one had attended the high school, and only 
about 7 per cent had completed the grammar school. Other 
manufacturers whom he consulted reported that they thought 
these statistics about right for their employees. Thus the high 
school does not reach even the skilled laborers. 

Second, the grades are too archaic and traditionally ob- 
livious of modern life. They stand under the dominion of 
the past, and are isolated from present, practical conditions, 
inadequate to our civilization, enmeshed in effete theories of 
general culture, and there is need of a great awakening. They 
are unmindful of the era of radical reconstruction that im- 
pends. Our educational leaders discourse learnedly of theo- 
ries of interest, but have allowed the schools under their 
charge to lose, if not to kill, the interest of boys in the dawn- 
ing teens. This loss is nothing less than tragic. The causes 
of this withdrawal are not flattering. In this country the in- 
terests of children dominate; parental authority is usually 
weak or not exercised; while compulsory laws, where they 
exist, are ineffective. We have neglected to study the most 
vital thing in the situation, namely, the zests of the young. 
The Massachusetts Commission found that of 3,157 families, 
most could afford to send their children to school from 14 to 
16, and would have done so had the education been likely to 
be of use, and under virile, practical men. The boys left 
school because they wanted to, and not because their parents 
wished them to do so, and often against their desires. Sixty- 
three per cent of the boys declared they would have gone to 
a trade school, and 55 per cent of the parents would have 
sent them. 

Third, we have not taken account of the nature of the 
great upheaval at the dawn of the teens, which marks the 
pubescent ferment, and which requires distinct change in mat- 
ter and method of education. This instinct is far stronger 
and has more very ostensive outcrops than in any other age 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 545 

and land, and it is less controlled by the authority of the 
school or the home. It is a period of very rapid, if not ful- 
minating, psychic expansion. It is the natal hour of new curi- 
osities, when adult life first begins to exert its potent charm. 
It is an age of exploration, of great susceptibility, plasticity, 
eagerness, pervaded by the instinct to try and plan in many 
different directions. An important factor is found in the sig- 
nificant circumstance that a very large proportion of Ameri- 
can parents are discontented with their own vocations and 
do not care for their children to follow in their own foot- 
steps, so that their offspring, as a rule, pass through a period 
lasting some years of wasteful tension, trial, and error. They 
drift and finally settle to a calling with little complacency, and 
one perhaps for which they are not only ill-adapted by train- 
ing but unfitted by their nature — an evil which vocation bu- 
reaus might do much to remedy. One careful study shows 
that even skilled workmen here often distinctly do not wish 
their children to follow their own trade. The lesson of the 
many immigrants, like the Irish, who have developed from the 
lowest to the highest industries, rather suggests certain ad- 
vantages in this unsettlement. The Massachusetts Child 
Labor Committee studied the choice of vocation of 300 adults 
and found that less than 5 per cent of them were satisfied 
with their calling. A. C. Thompson, of Auburn, N. Y., asked 
467 pupils what vocation they had planned and noted their 
choice, and 11 years later found that only 5 per cent of the 
406 of them he could reach were following the calling they 
proposed. Thus an early choice of vocation, which is now 
often advocated in the interests of vocational efficiency, seems 
to be more or less opposed to American ideas. 

But the boy who leaves school early has a hard time. The maxi- 
mal age limit for compulsory school attendance is usually 14, and 
employers of skilled labor will rarely take boys or girls under 16 
or 18. Those from 14 to 16 who have finished the seventh grade 
are rarely wanted as apprentices and have to wait from i to 4 years 
and take whatever comes. Hence they enter unskilled occupations 
with poor pay, often very unsanitary conditions, and perhaps night 
work, so that these years are often wasted if not worse. It is in 
fact very difficult to go from a low, unskilled into a skilled industry 
and few achieve it. Unsteadiness of employment is the rule. The 
girls, who usually leave school to dress better, and boys, who do 
36 



546 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

so because their chums do, or to earn money, are often subjected to 
grievous disappointment. The work they do affords little opportu- 
nity for development. The Massachusetts Labor Commission inter- 
view^ed 2,000 boys who had attended public school in 1879. Of these 
855 stated that they would have remained in school had it taught 
them a trade. Only 36 thought their school had fitted them for any 
definite line of work. Of the total number, 458 were receiving an 
average wage of about $4 per week and 258 less than $7 per week. 
In Manhattan 1,000 children from 14 to 16 secured employment cer- 
tificates. Out of 603 traced, 489 were at work and 56 were doing 
some studying, while the others were idle or engaged in juvenile 
employments or unskilled labor. Two hundred and ninety-six of the 
319 New York parents of these children favored industrial educa- 
tion. The superintendent of Cincinnati schools issued employment 
certificates to 195 school children, of whom 137 were 14, and 59 
were 15. During the first 22 days of June, 1908, of this total, 55 
secured employment in shoe and box factories, clothing stores, mes- 
senger service, bakeries, and laundries. The majority of these boys 
had not finished the sixth grade. Another line of inquiry shows 
that it is not the low-grade foreigners who are most prone to take 
their children from the schools. Another census of young wage- 
earners shows that 55 per cent were errand, messenger, and office 
boys, 45 per cent entered mills ; of the girls, 28 per cent became 
cash, errand, and candy girls, and 72 per cent entered mills. Thirty- 
three per cent of these boys and girls entered unskilled and 65 per 
cent low-grade industries, and only 2 per cent skilled. Far less 
girls than boys undertook skilled labor. The wages of cash girls 
before the age of 17 are usually from $5 to $9 a week. They 
usually reach the height of their earning power before 20 with an 
income of from $8 to $10, which they will never exceed.^ The 
Lewis Institute of Chicago lately advertised for boys from 16 to 18 
to take their cooperative course, one week in the shop and the next 
in the school. One advertisement brought 60 boys. 

The above facts show what it is very hard for pedagogues 
to reahze, viz., that very few children have any real intel- 
lectual interests. Intellectual interests are very subordinate 
with most. Very few have taste or ability for learning. Most 
boys are in school to get something out of it. Most never 
have, can, or will care at all for culture or know what it 
means. The stock school studies do not appeal to but often 
bore them. The drill to which they have been subjected be- 
fore pubescence becomes irksome when they reach this crisis. 

^ Kingsbury, S. M. What is Ahead for the Untrained Child in Industry? 
Charities, 1907, vol. 19, pp. 808-813. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 547 

They are impatient of books, which seem to them to hide hfe. 
So strong is their aversion to school that parents, teachers, 
and the law combined do not keep them there. There is a 
sad misfit here. We fail to adapt the boy to the school or the 
school to the boy. Again, there always ought to be a rather 
exact correlation between the age limits of compulsory at- 
tendance and the lower age limit of admission to the local in- 
dustries. In fact, many who leave for work cannot find it, 
because employers can obtain all the crude help they want 
from older boys for the same pay. Of 354 employers asked, 
250 objected to employing children under 16, and 228 did not 
believe children were of much value in industry, although 320 
of them favored trade training. Hence, those who are un- 
successful are not only idle but peculiarly exposed to bad in- 
fluences, liable to form bad habits, grow wild, may become 
a menace to society and a nuisance to themselves, their par- 
ents, and the neighbors in their community. At the most 
susceptible age of life, when more than at any other they 
need — and in all ages and lands before have had — the most 
training and attention (because the history of education from 
primitive races up shows that it always begins here and ex- 
tends up toward the university and down toward the kin- 
dergarten as civilization advances) they are tossed out upon 
the world and now thrown into the city street. The condition 
of these boys is pitiable in the extreme as well as dangerous. 
They wish to do and earn something, but every door is shut 
in their faces. Their schooling does not prove of aid to them, 
so they naturally query what good more schooling would do. 
These unappropriated, useless boys often group together in 
gangs and a few of them become criminal. They are disap- 
pointed, restless, irregular in their habits., Those who have 
been in school a little longer find themselves often surpassed 
by those who left earlier. Those who find employment must 
often put up with odd jobs and small pay, and so, as one 
special study shows, boys who find employment under 16 
change from two to seven times a year. Gradually, as the 
years pass, they earn a living wage in some employment they 
never dreamed of entering, and, although the pay is small, 
they have settled into the rut just enough so that they cannot 
afford to change, for to begin another line would involve at 



548 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

least temporary loss. Thus many slowly settle into unskilled 
laborers, but with the worm of regret and disquiet gnawing 
at their hearts and perhaps with a subtle feeling that things 
are wrong, so that they are ready on any occasion to join 
the ranks of the discontented after years of hoping for some- 
thing that never came. 

It has been estimated that boys and girls from 14 to 16 
who enter unskilled industries reach their maximum earning 
capacity at the age of 18 or 19, Those who attend school 
till 16 or 18, although they have little skill or intelligence, 
are more likely to secure mercantile positions and, if they take 
technical courses, progress more rapidly, although this is 
largely due, not to what they have learned in school, but to 
greater physical and mental maturity. The Massachusetts 
Commission says summarily : " For the purpose of training 
for efficiency in productive employments, these added years 
which they spend in school are to a considerable extent lost 
years." It is passive rather than active power and ability to 
render service that the schools develop. School children by 
no means get equal opportunities to make the most of them- 
selves in our schools as at present constituted, because they 
chiefly regard the few who go on instead of the many who 
drop off. 

Nevertheless, we have many estimates often set forth in 
graphic figures by partisans of industrial education and es- 
pecially by institutions, calculated to show parents and pupils 
the pecuniary advantages of staying in school. The United 
States Commissioner of Labor says that a common school 
education increases a man's wage-earning power 50 per cent, 
a high-school training 100 per cent, and college training 200 
per cent. C. F. Perry, director of the public trade school in 
Milwaukee, figures the value of a trade school education 
something as follows : a 14-year-old boy is worth $4 a week 
or $200 a year, which equals a 5 per cent income on $4,000. 
A trade school, we are told, will take the boy at this age, and 
in two years make him worth $15 a week or $800 a. year, 
which equals 5 per cent on $16,000 — a fourfold augmenta- 
tion in two years. It is a somewhat suspicious circumstance 
that, if we compare the collection of money value estimates 
of education, they show great diversities of method and, re- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 549 

suit, and that they have hitherto been used chiefly as appeals 
to young people to go to college and other higher institutions. 
The economic value of trade training is undoubtedly very 
great, but it is not yet comprehensively made out in statistical 
form, although the pure culturist in education scorns this very 
point of view because he insists that the highest value of edu- 
cation is not counted in dollars and cents. It is, nevertheless, 
of the greatest significance not only for national efficiency 
generally, but also for the peace of mind and prosperity of all 
kinds of toilers. 

After this period of years of unsettlement, change, anx- 
iety, youth in the later teens and the early twenties often come 
to appreciate the value of special training and are disposed 
to set apart time and some of their earnings to make up past 
loss and to better their condition in the future. They turn 
to evening, and perhaps in this country rather more often to 
correspondence, schools. This work, however helpful it may 
be in many cases, is always undertaken under grievous disad- 
vantages. One authority states that a large number of those 
seeking these courses are not proficient in the fundamental 
rules of arithmetic. The best courses on paper, some of which 
are well and some very inadequately worked out, lack two 
vital things : first, the personal touch, guidance, and inspira- 
tion of the teacher, which letters, under the best conditions, 
cannot make good; and, second, the material or laboratory 
element. No educational announcements are more alluring. 
Probably no institutions are resorted to by a class of young 
people so thoroughly in earnest to increase their knowledge 
and better their position. It is commendable to the spirit of 
our country that these young men wish to rise; but it is not 
creditable to the leading educational states and cities where 
they live and were brought up that they must seek what they 
want so late and so far away. Vast numbers begin but few 
complete the best of these courses. In 1898 the International 
Correspondence School at Scranton had an enrollment of 
80,000; but this has now increased to more than 100,000 per 
annum. On November 12, 1906, it numbered 940,000 stu- 
dents. In June, 1907, 12,143 h^d finished their course and 
were granted certificates, and the school now grants annually 
about 2,700 diplomas, a number which nearly equals those 



550 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

given by all the engineering- and technical colleges in the 
country. Over 80 per cent of some 300,000 students of the 
correspondence school did not know fractions when they began. 
The American Correspondence School of Chicago has prob- 
ably about 10,000 enrolled. Over 70,000 in the State of Ohio 
are taking correspondence courses and have paid in tuition 
nearly $5,000,000.^ It is estimated that about 55,000 in Mas- 
sachusetts, with all its higher educational institutions, are 
taking correspondence courses and have paid in tuition near- 
ly $2,200,000, assuming each to have paid $50. This amount 
at interest at 4 per cent would yield $88,000, and if distrib- 
uted among the 28 industrial centers of the state would give 
each $3,100, which might pay instruction for 300 students in 
technical and commercial courses in each city. C. R. Mann ^ 
estimates that more people are taking correspondence courses 
in this country than are enrolled in all secondary and higher 
institutions. In England there are about 12,000 adult 
schools. France, where compulsory attendance ends at 13, 
has 1,000,000 continuation pupils, 52,000 courses, 40,000 pop- 
ular libraries, 110,000 lectures attended by 3,000,000 people. 

The pedagogy of industrial education is best begun by a glance 
at the nvediccval gilds, in which labor attained a more ideal organiza- 
tion than ever before or since. Taken at their best, they represent 
the world's golden age of artisanship and ought to be studied by 
modern labor leaders somewhat as literary men study the great 
mythopceic cycles in Homer, the Arthuriad, the Niebelungenlied, etc. 
Their relation to labor may be not entirely without aptness com- 
pared with that of the Apostolic Age to contemporary Christianity. 
Strange to say, although their influence is still so potent in England 
and western Europe, their history, which almost began with Bren- 
tano's brilliant sketch,^ is very imperfectly known, the original rec- 
ords having sometimes been withheld despite orders of the courts 
(for some of them involve present business interests) while the 
original records, when accessible, are voluminous and hard to de- 
cipher. In London alone no less than iii of these were listed in 

^ MacGruder. Present Status of Technical Education in Ohio. State Bulletin. 

^ Mann, C. R. Industrial and Technical Training in the Secondary Schools 
and its Bearing on College-entrance Requirements. School Review, 1908, vol. 
16, pp. 425-438- 

3 Brentano, Lujo. On the History and Development of Gilds and the Origin of 
Trade-unions. (In J. T. Smith, English Gilds. London, Triibner, 1870. Preface, 
pp. 49-199-) 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 551 

1422.^ There were gilds of judges, doctors, bankers, tailors, spin- 
ners, bookbinders, builders, weavers, upholsterers, poulterers, hat- 
ters, dyers, armorers, vintners, pewterers, ropers, tapestrers, cord- 
wainers, haberdashers, mongers or venders of fish, cheese, corn, 
wood, wine, oil, soap, as well as manufacturers and dealers in goods 
of silk, wool, skin, net makers, glovers, merchant tailors, etc. These 
corporations, societies, or unions sometimes erected halls, almost a 
score of which, some recent and imposing, exist in London to-day. 
The gilds differed very widely in power, size, and mode of organiza- 
tion. Some had many aspects of a secret society like the Masons ; 
some had their greater and their lesser mysteries, perhaps their initi- 
ations. Very common were the stages of apprentice, journeyman 
and master, the latter producing his masterpiece, somewhat as a 
baccalaureate to-day does a thesis, after 7 years of apprenticeship. 
Skill in workmanship was the most precious possession of members 
of the crafts' gilds. They had we know not how much to do with 
the rearing of the great cathedrals; and the earliest universities, 
especially those of Paris and Bologna, were at first only gilds of 
scholars and masters. Their codes sought to maintain high stand- 
ards of honor and excellence in arts and crafts as well as in trade. 
Some had their own churches or chapels; and there were many 
mutual help features in case of illness or death. Some were domi- 
nant factors in the development of municipalities. Some controlled 
the exchange, markets, held elections, were fraternal and republican, 
and held penalizing, forestalling and all such practices unworthy of a 
true trade or crafts man. Some became very rich and their cap- 
tains of industry led lives of luxury of which they were ostentatious. 
Some endowed schools; they often instituted miracle plays, held 
exhibitions and fairs for the display of their products, devised many 
pageants and gorgeous processionals. To turn out inferior work 
was disloyalty, and the best codes distinctly tended to make an 
aristocracy of expert craftsmanship, to foster pride in the product, 
and to crown virtuosity wherever it appeared. Gilds levied taxes 

1 Unwin, George. The Gilds and Companies of London. London, Methuen, 
1908. 397 p. See also Edgcumbe Staley: The Gilds of Florence (London, Me- 
thuen, 1906. 622 p.), in which he divides those that existed there into 9 great, 4 
intermediate, and 9 minor gilds. Also A. Milnes: From Gild to Factory. London, 
Finch, 1904. 83 p. Also J. Toulmin Smith: English Gilds, the Original Ordinances 
of more than One Hundred Early English Gilds as they Existed in the Year 1389. 
London, Triibner, 1870. 483 p. Also P. Brisson: Histoire du Travail et des Tra- 
vailleurs. Paris, Delagrave, 1906. 538 p. 

The monasteries of the eighth and ninth centuries always strove to get the 
best craftsmen, and so did the feudal lords. To pass off spurious or defective work 
often cost the workman his hand or ear. Every father had to teach his son all the 
secrets of the trade and journeymen must travel for three years in different lands. 
In Germany there still must often be an examination before three masters of the 
trade, a professor of chemistry and physics, and a school-teacher, together with 
a work — drawings and all — made by the candidate. 



552 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

on their members, sometimes constructed great public works, sent 
out trading expeditions by land and sea, etc., etc. 

Now the fascinating feature about the arts and crafts movement 
of to-day is seen from a culture-history even more than from an 
educational point of view. It is that it belongs to a group of move- 
ments, great and small, which have been motivated by harking back 
to an earlier stage of culture or picking up a lost chord. Here belong, 
e. g., the revival of interest among the ancient Hebrews under Ezra 
in their own Scriptures when they returned from captivity to re- 
build Zion and listened all day to the story of how Jahve had dealt 
with their forefathers of old; the Renaissance, when classical an- 
tiquity and its ideals inspired Europe; Protestantism so far as its 
slogan was " Back to the Scriptures " ; the revival of sacramentalism 
and Catholicism under Pusey and Newman ; and in a smaller way 
the enthusiasm with which many primitive races and even civilized 
nations have revived ancient national dances (see Chapter II), cus- 
toms, pageants, processionals, etc. And so the arts and crafts cult 
of to-day is a to be sure rather feeble effort to revive and trans- 
figure medisevalism in industry, also involving transformations of 
social ideals supposed to be germane to the gild spirit. In a sense, 
the movement originated in Sir Walter Scott's defiance of effete 
classical art and his preference for the Gothic; the pre-Raphaelite 
revolt against the alien classical element which Sir Joshua Reynolds 
introduced made its contribution ; and also Carlyle's sonorous and 
impressive phrases concerning the dignity of work, and his glorifica- 
tion of great men as those who can do rather than know, talk or 
write. He said: "Our terrestrial planet, nine tenths of which is 
vacant or tenanted by nomads, is still crying, ' Come and till me, 
come and reap me.' " This cry falls on deaf ears in the slums, be- 
cause the desire for companionship overpowers all others. 

One may well stand aghast at the following words of John Stuart 
Mill : " It is doubtful whether the use of machinery has yet light- 
ened the day's toil of a single human being," although we call them 
labor-saving devices. If they relieve great efforts and the funda- 
mental muscles, they often lay greater burdens upon the finer move- 
ments, the nervous system, and restrict liberty, and are especially 
fateful for individuality. The cult of utility has driven out that of 
beauty and man has lost pleasure in his work. Instead of healthful 
merriment, he is herded in great penlike workshops and is deficient 
even in the primal conditions of life: light, air, water, food. No 
contrast can be greater than that of the factory system, where man 
becomes a slave of his machine and often its victim with almost 
crushing monotony and sameness of work, and the spirit of Hans 
Sachs, the poet cobbler in old Nuremberg, or the condition of in- 
dustry and trade at the end of the thirteenth century where Valera 
describes 21 gilds with 7 of them chief. They were perhaps the 
most potent influence of their day. Ruskin's writings have for 
fifty years been codified on a vast variety of topics and many have 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 553 

admired him to an unreasonable degree, which seems to silence their 
critical faculty and makes them mistake religious and social rhap- 
sody for art criticism. In the day of great scientific men, Ruskin 
dared to assert the right of sentiments in the world which, despite 
some of his sayings to the contrary, were more or less antagonistic 
to science. He gloried in inconsistencies and moods, would utterly 
destroy most railways, tear down and rebuild the Houses of Parlia- 
ment, the National Gallery, East London ; destroy and rebuild Edin- 
burgh and New York, etc., in a way that doubtless suggested Patrick 
Geddes's elaborate volume planning for the expenditure of millions 
in reconstructing the ruins and rebuilding the town ot Dunfermline, 
Carnegie's birthplace, which even his commission, which is doing 
perhaps more than was ever done in the way of reconstruction for 
any modern town, regarded with consternation for its radical ideal- 
ism. At Coniston, in England's lake region, Ruskin devised an engi- 
neering scheme to reclaim land and attract labor. He taught draw- 
ing at evening classes to working men, lectured to audiences crowded 
to the door, resigned his place at the University because it refused 
to buy Turner's picture, " The Crook of Lune," sanctioned vivisec- 
tion, endowed a masterpiece for the art school at Oxford, inherited 
£175,000, and died almost poor; founded St. George's Gild to effect a 
return to primitive agriculture where modern machines and manu- 
factories were banished, and the vows of the inmates inculcated 
reverence to God, honor, obedience, economy, industry, and was 
frenzied because it failed; and wrote his immortal works. Yet he 
never wrote a line that was coarse, frivolous, or designed to win 
either money or popularity. He pilloried what he called the " School 
of Cram " and resisted extreme specialization, which he thought in- 
compatible with culture. " Great nations write their biographies in 
three manuscripts : the book of their words, the book of their deeds, 
and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood 
unless we read the other two; but of the three the only one alto- 
gether trustworthy is the last." Holman Hunt, Millais, Maddox 
Brown, wrote in this spirit; and the pre-Raphaelite revolt "with 
simpering faces, brown cows, the same white sails in the squalls and 
the same slices of lemon in the saucers " at any rate marked the 
violence of the insurrection against the alien classical element which 
Sir Joshua Reynolds had introduced. This is not the place to write 
the history of this movement or to more than refer to one or two of 
the literary products which it inspired, such as Sir Walter Besant's 
" All Sorts and Conditions of Men," which resulted in the People's 
Palace; Bradley Oilman's "Back to the Soil," a typical chapter in 
which is " The Lesson Drawn from a Pie," which is a circle city 
consisting of farms with dwellings near the apex of each wedge, 
raying out into first flowers, then market gardens, then mow land, 
and farthest out tillage and forest, with park, church, clubs, schools, 
department stores, near the center ; " The Land of Decay," by Rene 
Bazin, which shows how the French peasantry had degenerated under 



554 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

modern industry, describing the gradual decay of the typical family, 
member by member, a decay that was also physiological, moral, and 
religious, although with a glimpse of hope in the one best woman 
left of an old family who gives herself to a vigorous poor man, the 
husband of her choice, in order to try to regenerate the stock. 

William Morris, a student of Chaucer, author of the " Earthly 
Paradise," the modern skald who told the great story of the north 
which " should be for all our race what the tale of Troy was to the 
Greeks," was himself skilled in the technic of half a dozen trades, 
and was an artist socialist, urging that " all men should have work 
to do which should be worth doing and pleasant." In 1852 he 
entered Oxford and came in contact with Burne-Jones. As a young 
man he thought of founding a religious brotherhood whose patron 
should be Sir Galahad. His ideal was a commonwealth where there 
should be neither rich nor poor, idle nor overworked, master nor 
master's man, and he was driven to the view that revolution was the 
only hope. In 1859 he planned his famous Red House, prototype of 
the Queen Anne style, for his lovely bride. Later he founded the 
firm of Morris & Company for ecclesiastical decoration at the time 
of the aesthetic revival among London churches, and pilgrimages are 
yet made to the windows he built from i860 to 1870. Growing in- 
terested in weaving and dyeing, which he studied in his own vats, he 
devised a system of colors with very frank hues before the aniline 
dyes, and criticised the Gobelin factories as degrading fine art to a 
mere upholsterer's toy. In his study for revival he set up a hand 
loom in his own bedroom and became an expert workman. Then 
came the Kelmscott Press, in 1890, from which after careful study 
of the great mediaeval printers and binders, Elzevir, Aldus, Plantins, 
and Estiennes, its chief masterpiece, Chaucer, appeared in 1896, the 
result of a year and nine months' work. The true workman, he 
held, must have a bent so strong that no education can force him 
from it. The creation of beauty should be to him as necessary as 
his daily bread. He lectured all over the kingdom, joined the So- 
cialistic League to promote " revolutionary international socialism," 
marched in processions, edited the " Common Weal." His " com- 
pany " was composed entirely of artists, students, and literary men, 
and the aim >vas to produce objects demanding the highest orig- 
inality of conception and skill down to tables, cupboards, settles, 
andirons, candlesticks and table glass. Tradesmen resented his 
intrusion into their sphere. He studied worsted work, crewels, and 
designed serges and chintzes for mural decoration, as well as carpets 
and wall paper. 

Cobden-Sanderson at the age of forty dropped his barrister's wig 
and gown for the beretta and blouse of a workman, and established 
the Doves Bindery in London, and became the apostle and prophet 
of labor wedded to art and intelligence. His concern expressed a 
social conviction, for all share profits and his disciples call him " the 
first citizen of Altruria." Not only is manual labor held to dignify 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 555 

existence, but the maxim here is not to succeed, but to excel. In 
working on the book beautiful in beaten leather or crushed Levant 
to which each worker's name is attached, the workshop becomes not 
merely a place to make a living, but a place of the greatest pleasure 
and honor. Illumination, tooling, printing on vellum or full white 
pigskin, and incidental carving, chipping, upholstery and cabinet 
making in fumed oak, driftwood, pyrography, burned wood, etc., are 
now undertaken by the best representatives of the crafts movement 
on the principle that, if the work is in the man, the man puts him- 
self into his work. 

The influence of this movement has spread far and in many 
directions. The weaving and tapestry house of Haslemere near the 
home of Tennyson, George Eliot, and Tyndall, is one type, with its 
picturesque and mediaeval stone cottages and half-timber houses with 
overhanging stories, where about 1894 Joseph King started weaving 
and other industries that the village girls might not drift to London. 
The two workshops of two stories each were designed by a well- 
known artist; and there are daily visitors to see the rare linen and 
cotton fabrics, all of which are hand-woven and sometimes hand- 
spun, or the chests, presses, wheels, reels, and looms rich in color. 
Woolen rugs, peasant tapestry, linen applique for wall hangings and 
ceremonial usages are made, and on the wall are Blount's fine de- 
signs in gesso, with hand-made pottery on shelves. The same work- 
men continue, year after year, happy, natural, self-supporting. The 
founder held that the redemption of art must come from the work- 
ers who with loving touch decorate things useful for every day. To 
be sure, the real originalities are rare, few and far between. It is 
impossible to enumerate the many lesser movements which have 
their inspiration here : e. g., the Evelyn Nordhoff hand bindery at 
Syracuse; Douglas Volk's colony at Lovell, Me., where carding, 
spinning, weaving, and rug work are done, the Deerfield revival of 
old Puritan home industries ; the Busck studio for hammered copper, 
brass, and tooled leather which is intended to bring design and pro- 
duction together, whether in building a house or reviving some lost 
art like that of the Abnakee rugs, or fine enamel work now taught 
at Boston and the Pratt Institute, or the discovery by the Tiffanys 
of the glass workman's processes as shown by the excavations of 
Herculaneum and Pompeii. Cathedrals claim their enthusiasts, one 
of whom calls them " joint products of God and the artists." While 
the high place of music, painting, poetry, and sculpture is by no 
means disparaged, it is urged that these are not the only lost arts 
that have been restored, or those that are remote, unfamiliar, and 
now insufficiently cultivated, but burned wood and leather, mosaic, 
silver and gold smithing, should have just as high a place. Elbert 
Hubbard began his work at East Aurora in the same spirit in the 
Roycroft or King Craft Shop. This is a small country place and the 
work started with printing, then bookbinding and some illuminating; 
terra cotta, stone work and modeling have been tried. Here some 



556 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

300 men and women, old and young, not excluding a few who were 
rescued from criminal careers, have been given opportunities to re- 
deem their lives. There is profit-sharing, a piano in the workroom, 
social gatherings, concerts, lectures, and dances. The first building 
to be put up was of cobblestones, brought by the townsfolk at one 
dollar a load. The Philistine is its well-known organ, and its opin- 
ions are certainly unique, reeking with individuality and with rol- 
licking independence. Douglas Cockerell,^ who learned his craft 
under Sanderson, has published a fascinating volume calculated to 
make everyone desire to drop everything else and become a book- 
binder. 

In his famous oration on the lost arts," Wendell Phillips sought 
to modify our Fourth of July spirit by urging that in art the really 
great masters are all dead and that no modern compares with 
Homer, Phidias, Raphael, and Shakespeare. He quotes Dunlop, who 
says that in all nations there are only about 250 to 300 distinct 
stories. He names even many well-known jokes that he is able to 
trace back for centuries, some of them to classical antiquity ; tells 
us that in Pompeii we find ground, colored, and common window 
glass ; that the Chinese had a colorless glass which, when filled with 
a colorless fluid, seemed to be full of fish ; that a Roman in the 
day of St. Paul had a glass cup which, when dashed to the pave- 
ment and dented, could be hammered into shape; that besides this 
malleable glass there was another specimen which, hung up by one 
end, would dwindle to a thread and become as flexible as wool; in 
Rome they made a solid bit of glass in the center of which was a 
colored drop which must have been poured into it, which was as 
large as a pea, finely mottled with shifting hues; the vase of Genoa 
was a solid emerald, said to have been the Queen of Sheba's gift to 
Solomon and used by our Savior at the Last Supper, and which 
Napoleon brought to France; Cicero said he saw the entire Iliad 
written on a skin rolled to the compass of a nut shell; could this 
have been photography? Nero had a ring with a gem which he 
used as an opera glass ; Bunsen tells of a signet ring from Cheops so 
finely engraved that the inscription is invisible except with a 
strong glass; Phillips knew a man who had a ring with a stone 
three fourths of an inch in diameter with the naked figure of 
Hercules, in which with glasses you could tell every muscle and 
count the hairs on the eyebrows, which must have been made with 
a magnifying glass; the old Tyrian colors are so permanent that 
they flame up now when unearthed ; a Cashmere shawl worth $30,000 
is described, with 300 distinct hues and colors which the best 
dyers in Europe can hardly distinguish. When the English plun- 
dered the Summer Palace of the Emperor of China, they found 
wrought metal vases of many kinds far beyond European skill; the 

^ Book Binding and the Care of Books. Lend., Hogg, 1901. 342 p. 
2 Best., 1888. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 557 

Damascus blades of the Crusaders, though not gilded, are as bright 
as they were eight centuries ago ; there was one at the London exhi- 
bition, " the point of which could be made to touch the hilt " and 
which could be put into its scabbard like a corkscrew ; the London 
watchmakers found the best steel, not in Sheffield, but in the Pun- 
jab; the first needle made in England was by a negro in the time of 
Henry VIII, and when he died his art died with him; the first 
African travelers found a tribe in the interior who gave them better 
razors than they knew. Walter Scott describes Richard Coeur de 
Lion as severing a bar of iron, whereupon Saladin took an eider- 
down pillow and cut it in two with his sword, and then threw up 
the lightest scarf in the air and severed it before it descended; a 
Hindoo in Calcutta threw a handful of floss silk into the air and cut 
it in several pieces before it touched the ground; it was thought a 
triumph in the sixteenth century to have set up the obelisk in Rome 
on one end, yet the Egyptians quarried it and carried it 150 miles; 
the capital of Pompey's pillar is 100 feet high and weighs 2,000 
pounds. Arago thinks that the railroad dates back to Egypt, and 
that the Egyptians knew steam ; the Duchess of Burgundy took a 
necklace from a munimy and wore it to a ball in the Tuileries and 
everyone marveled; a Hindoo princess was sent home from court by 
her father because she was not decently covered, but she said, 
" Father, I have seven muslin suits on." ^ 

The true craftsman should always have in mind the praise and 
blame not of the masses but of the master. This ought not to be 
hard when one is young and able to see the good in everything. 
Plant forms, wings of birds, butterflies, and hedgerows can be 
sources of suggestive inspiration and motives of design. Craftsmen 
must fight against dreary monotony in both conception and execution. 
Psychology cannot explain the strange deep satisfaction that is 
caused by, e. g., a copper coal-hod hammered into artistic form, a 
candlestick, jug, key, screen, andirons, lampshade, brooch, pendant, 
setting for a precious stone, enamel work, tile panel, designs in 
wood, bookbinding or any kind of surface or relief that expresses 



1 It should be mentioned that the more artistic lines of development which also 
motivated the arts and crafts movement were, strangely enough, given a curious 
set-back by the allegiance of Oscar Wilde and the caricature of the affectations of 
this movement by the Gilbert-Sullivan opera "Patience," which ridiculed its 
symbolisms as not genuine. The stained glass attitudes in which the dragoons 
twist themselves, the contortions of the soulful maidens in the chorus with their 
devitalized arms and sinuous bodies that waved and writhed in love "with a four- 
teenth-century Florentine frenzy," was directed against Bume- Jones, the son 
of a small shopkeeper, who was dreamy and really feminine in his nature. The 
parody on Morris was the pale olive, peacock blue and pomegranate garb of the 
crushed Bunthom and his admiring bevy. Rossetti was the target in the revival of 
obsolete meter forms where sound overpowers sense. The whole movement was 
made to appear as mere pre-Raphaelite mannerism and pettiness. 



558 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

anything whatever that is new and tasteful, even though it be only an 
amateur's work. If we could only learn that " that is best which lieth 
nearest " and that genius consists often in simply finding the easiest 
and most natural way, so that the marvel is that it was not seen and 
realized before — this would teach us how, as Keats said, " Beauty 
is truth and truth beauty." Perhaps we ought also to understand 
the truth in Ruskin's statement that there is more genius in spending 
money discriminatingly than in acquiring it. The end is to utter 
one's self, objectify what is in one's mind. The true artist knows less 
about even his own method than anyone. If he tries to tell how, 
he makes sorry, clumsy work of explaining himself. Thus the 
canons and rules and all that the prowling pedants can do is simply 
to follow after the man dowered with a happy facility. Nothing is 
good and true not marked by the author's personal quality ; and this 
cannot be analyzed or accounted for. Such an ideal should hover 
over all skilled labor and inspire with self-confidence, for that is^the 
secret of all originality. No one can gauge his own capacities 
aright till after a long series of efforts to express his own ego; but 
the joyous, epochful moment comes when, starting with a meager 
idea, it unfolds into something of greater worth that fits and utters 
the inmost self. 

The arts and crafts literature is voluminous and includes many 
Utopias in prose and poetry, all the way from Bellamy to Tolstoy 
and Kropotkin, and its attempted realizations range from Brook 
Farm' and endless cooperative if not communistic organizations to 
Saint George's Gild and the Essex House and Gild of Mr. 
Ashbee. It proclaims not so much the Gospel as the Apocalypse 
of a new industrialism which is to be evolved on principles far 
higher than current economics. Cost is the quality and quantity 
of work that is put into a product. Price is what it commands 
in exchange with others. Wages are what will keep the artisans 
up to the top of their condition and most fecund in bringing 
new things into existence. The movement is socialistic and awaits 
a new order of things in which privilege and competition and 
great lords of industry who treat workmen as machines shall be 
done away with and artificial poverty shall cease. " Life without 
industry is guilt, and industry without art is brutality." It proclaims 
a true commonwealth which will one day control all means of pro- 
duction. Those who live in its cycle of thought want the book 
beautiful, the fabric, house, furniture, dress,- etc., beautiful, and a 
new society composed of those who make their work art and love it 
rather than coerced toilers anxious only to do the least in the least 
time and get the most cash for it and hie to the saloon and brothel, 
since drudgery will inevitably seek recompense in pleasure and all 
who hate work are prone to dissipation. Every workman should 
express some trait of his or her individuality at least in minor arts, 
while use and beauty should at every point be united. The work- 
shop is at once a school, a factory, and a state in which all are 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 559 

citizens and colleagues. It illustrates the true comradeship of ap- 
prenticeship and master workman and arbiter or guide. The greater 
pleasure and enhancement of life is the end of art; to get a living 
is to gain more hope, love, and admiration, for these augment life. 
Each shop should be a studio. Every v^^ork should shov^ the applica- 
tion of a personal touch, at least in the form of decoration, and all 
should strive to render social service by producing a perfect product. 
We must love our work as if it were play, be proud of what we 
make because our life has gone into it. Art and daily life must be 
united. Each in the industrial new republic, too, will own a house 
that he made and which fits and expresses himself, and some land 
about it that he may touch the soil and raise something. If the 
wages of all noble work are in heaven, as Carlyle said, we draw 
near to the celestial in so far as we make all laborers artists and all 
artists laborers. Triggs well says ^ that this idea will be realized 
about the time that Plato's ideal is, that philosophers shall be kings 
and kings philosophers. Work is a blessed privilege and its true 
and best product is a joy forever, for it brings the full fruition, than 
which nothing is greater, of original creation, of something which 
the world never saw before. This movement is a splendid iridescent 
soJution of present troubles, but it is too ideal for the rank and file 
of men to-day. It may well attract the elite craftsmen who can 
inaugurate it here and there in a small way, but alas ! the regenera- 
tion of society which it seeks is at least remote and few of us will 
live to see such an industrial millennium. So while we may bid it the 
heartiest of Godspeeds and pray for the coming of its kingdom, if 
we pray at all we must turn to nearer and more immediately prac- 
tical, if less comprehensive, methods of industrial education. 

The causes of the decline of this, in many respects, splendid 
system to the attenuated rehct of the apprentice system is a 
very complex and much mooted question. The chief causes 
are probably the following: 

(a) The specialization of many industries make it more 
immediately imperative for both employer and employee that 
the latter should focus on one process and become master in 
a small part of a trade, the rest being of nO' direct use. Where 
there are many processes it would require one expert to teach 
each most effectively, and this would be too expensive. 
Again, where piece work prevails, every moment a workman 
spends in teaching a novice is lost time so far as his own 
wages are concerned. One who wishes to change from one 

1 O. L. Triggs. Chapters in The History of Arts and Crafts Movement. Chicago, 
1902. 198 p. 



56o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

machine to another that he has seen a httle of, goes to a new- 
shop, puts in practice what he has observed, until the foreman 
comes around, sees his lack of skill and discharges him. If 
he persists, he goes to the next shop and holds a similar job 
a little longer. Hanus knows one man who repeated this 
nineteen times. This, few will do — it is stealing a trade. In 
a large tailoring establishment, 39 men make a coat, and in 
a printing plant there are about a dozen trades. To make the 
70th part of a shoe hardly takes the 70th part of a man, and 
nobody can perform all the processes. J. Skiffington stated 
that he left his employer nine times in seven years before he 
had learned his trade. 

(b) Machinery in some industries requires only tending, 
and needs little intelligence or skill, so that there is not much 
to learn. Where a raw hand can learn to operate an auto- 
matic or slot machine in a few hours, weeks, or months, and 
attain his or her maximal efficiency, there is no need of ap- 
prenticeship and no individual training is of much service. I 
know a large concern employing many hundred girls, which 
practically takes all who come. They look on and imitate 
those next them, make the few simple manipulations easily, 
and are paid according to the number of articles they run 
through their gear ; and at the end of a week a rapid girl often 
earns as much as slower ones who have been at it for years. 

(c) Foreign skilled labor has been so available that it is 
cheaper to import it than to train it here. J. A. W. Logan, 
of Utah, estimates that 50 per cent of our skilled artisans are 
foreign-born and trained. The committee of the National 
Association of Manufacturers (1908, p. 17) estimates that 
66 per cent, the New York Statistical Bureau that 60 per cent, 
Chicago that 70 per cent, Pittsburg that 75 per cent, the Bul- 
letin of the National Education Association for Industrial 
Education (1908) that 50 per cent of the skilled mechanics, 
and 90 per cent of the foremen were trained in Europe. It 
is of no economic significance to employers that native-born 
Americans are more commonly found in only the half-skilled 
employments, or that, as H. Dooley estimates, 99 per cent of 
the overseers in the Lawrence, Mass., mills were trained 
abroad; or that, as the National Education Association Com- 
mittee on Industrial Education says, " only about 2 per cent 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 561 

can be provided with an opportunity to learn trades here, the 
other 98 per cent remaining unskilled." As long as Europe 
will train enough, and as long as they will then come over 
and bring their skill ready-made to us, why go to the trouble 
and expense to train them here? 

(d) An apprentice system must involve some guarantee 
that boys who begin will stay long enough to become profit- 
able, as at first they usually involve expense. This makes 
needful some system, if not of indenture or binding out, at 
least the surety of a pledge of honor on the part of the par- 
ents or of the boy, or both, that he will stay on for a term of 
years. This, some states now make illegal. Moreover, their 
parents are reluctant to give such a pledge and, owing to the 
early emancipation of our youth from home control, the par- 
ents would be unable to do it effectively if they desired. To 
the American boy it often seems somewhat like a modified 
contract system of servitude ; he feels the time required to 
get his trade far too long — and naturally, when a man can 
be taken off the street and put in his place and in two months 
earn as much as it has taken him three or five years to learn 
to do. Moreover, learning a trade does not mean certainty 
of a job. Chiefly, however, he wants a wide-open world, and 
is sure that somewhere, sometime, a clean way to success will 
open up to him of itself. The very apprentice system idea 
is foreign to his nature. His chance is sure to come and Fate 
and Fortune may shake their choicest fruits into his lap in 
time, at least he wants to look about for himself and see if 
he cannot hit a good trail or strike a paying vein. He pre- 
fers to sample the world at several points, for never was 
the gambling spirit of trying for luck so strong. He pre- 
fers to find, rather than to make, his way, and feels it his 
ineluctable right to do so. What the boy wants, rather than 
what the father says, in this country too often goes. Often 
he will not learn a trade because he sees from a distance, and 
perhaps has felt from contact with it, the utterly deadening, 
stupid monotony of it all, and this repels him. Again, the 
big concern knows no personal relations ; and this is just what 
the boy both needs and wants. Apprentices make but little, 
for it is said that in the last forty years, wages of first-year 
apprentices have not increased, while those of all kinds of 
37 



562 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

labor have done so. In some cases doubtless, too, the Trade 
Unions have too much restricted the number of apprentices, 
especially where trades readily take in those of foreign birth. 
So, too, apprentice boys are often under the rules of the 
Union and, if there is a strike, must join it; and this is one 
reason why not only employers but eligible candidates for 
apprenticeship are not very cordial to it. Moreover, employ- 
ers too often refuse to take apprentices under 16; and this 
is unquestionably a little past the psychological age for appren- 
ticeship. 

(<?) Where the apprenticeship system exists in this coun- 
try, it is rather as a revival and under changed conditions, 
so that it is not what it was. Employers who use it, too, are; 
prone to be shortsighted, narrow, and selfish, perhaps without 
meaning to be so, because they have not only not fully real- 
ized all the possibilities of the system for themselves, but still 
less risen to see all their duties in this regard; although some 
now state that so great is their need of skilled labor that with 
it their output might be doubled. The modern captain of in- 
dustry has not been entirely successful in his efforts to stand 
in loco parentis. 

The Pullman experiment is well known. Pelzer, N. C, which 
in 1881 consisted of a log cabin, now has 6,000 or 8,000 in- 
habitants, the lives and destinies of all being in the hands of 
an industrial corporation administered as a very enlightened in- 
dustrial absolutism. There is no time nor money for municipal 
elections and everything is done for the welfare of the inhabitants 
that is consistent with profits. The school is built not by, but for, 
the children and keeps ten months. All sign an agreement that their 
children shall attend from five to twelve years of age. Ignorance 
does not make good producers, so schooling is profitable. There is 
a lyceum, library, occasional lectures, military organizations, baseball 
clubs, prizes for school attendance and for the most attractive yard 
and cottage. There is no home ownership as the company sells no 
property. This would prevent roving, but now, with 2 weeks' notice 
on either side, anyone can go. Not until 12 can children work. 
The paternalism here is less absolute than at Pullman. There is no 
proper apprenticeship here, but such instances impress the lesson 
that manufacturers should not as a class be alone intrusted with 
the industrial education of the boys and girls in their shops and 
mills, indispensable as they are as coadjutors. The state should 
rarely entirely relinquish its right at least to have a hand in the 
education of all its future citizens, because men and women are 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 563 

more than producers. In fact, the same causes that led employers 
to neglect the apprentice system decades ago and allow it to decay 
until lately, still operate even if happily with growing amelioration. 
Producers must think of profits and so incline to too short courses. 

(/) The Labor Unions have sometimes enforced restric- 
tions upon the apprentice system that make it onerous for cor- 
porations. The census of 1900 gives a total of 18,482 ap- 
prentices and helpers in 16 trades, constituting 2.45 per cent 
of the total number of employees. The highest proportion 
was 5.8 per cent among machinists, 5.7 per cent among 
plumbers, gas and steam fitters, and 6.7 in other miscellaneous 
industries. In the building trades in Massachusetts, 1.3 per 
cent are apprentices. A study by the American Social Science 
Association shows that of 48 Trade Unions with a member- 
ship of 500,000, 28 (membership 220,000) place no restric- 
tion upon apprenticeship; while 10 Unions (membership 107,- 
000) place the limits variously ranging from i to 15 per cent; 
the remaining 10 leaving the question of apprenticeship with 
the locality. A delegate lately interviewed 600 master-paint- 
ers and found that i in 15 had an apprentice. * The larger 
the shop, the greater the dislike to teaching boys. The Mas- 
sachusetts Commissioner of Labor reports (1906) that in that 
state the percentage of apprentices in closed, was no less than 
in open shops. Adams and Sumner ^ point out that only i 
strike in 300 has grown out of the apprentice system. Ben- 
son reported as a result of the St. Louis experiment that 
Labor Union apprenticeship rules in 19 trades allowed i ap- 
prentice to 8 journeymen, the largest number being among 
electric workers, i to 3, the smallest in glass blowing, i to 15. 
Of course, journeymen do not like to train apprentices who 
are liable to take their place. In general it would seem that 
the ratio of i apprentice to 4 journeymen in most trades 
would not be excessive. 

The attempts to revive the apprentice system are of great 
interest, but this will probably always be limited to a few 
lines of business. C. A. Howe found that of 400 Ohio manu- 
facturers, less than 65 had any kind of apprentice system, 

1 Thomas S. Adams and Helen L. Sumner. Labor Problems. New York, Mac- 
millan Co., 1905. 579 p. See p. 439. 



564 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and only 3 turned out finished workmen. The Massachusetts 
Bureau of Labor circulated the question, " Is there an ap- 
prentice system in your trade ? " Thirty-one employers and 
55 Labor Unions said yes and 44 no. Many firms require 
a common school education. Apprentices are often put in 
charge of the foreman, who may be a foreigner. E. A. Ste- 
vens found a New York town of 6,000 where only i boy 
was learning a trade and 2 helping their fathers. In another 
city a sign factory with 200 men had 14 apprentices, a pulley 
factory, and a clock factory with a large number of employees 
had none. As to the comparative value of daily training in 
tool work in the later grammar grades with apprenticeship in 
the shop, many opinions are quoted both ways. Surely a vig- 
orous boy of 14 should not be prevented from entering a trade. 
The committee on industrial education in the National Associa- 
tion of Manufacturers recommends a high grade trade school 
in cities of 30,000, that all these should turn out full-fledged 
journeymen, and that the apprentice system should not be 
allowed. 

As a basis for discussion and with the help, for this coun- 
try, of Mr. George H. Steves, I have gathered from many 
sources and from personal correspondence with nearly 200 
people, representing various aspects of the subject, data con- 
cerning the following typical recent departures, revised where 
possible to date (Summer of 19 10). 

Professor Schneider, of the University of Cincinnati, was the 
pioneer of a new movement when he established the plan of the 
engineering school of that institution where the classes are divided 
into two sections that alternate so that one is in the university and the 
other is in one of the electrical shops in the city. They begin with 
the foundry, pass to the machine shop, then are in the commutator 
and comptroller's office, the winding, testing, and erecting depart- 
ments, then in the drafting room and the office — thus following the 
raw material until the product is sold. A legal contract is made 
and signed by shop, student, and university. In the shop the pay 
is 10 cents an hour and increases at the rate of a cent an hour each 
6 months, so that they earn about $1,800 during the course. All 
must enter the shop during the summer preceding their entrance to 
college. The first year, 1906, 60 inquired, 40 went to the shops, 20 
remained and entered the university in. the fall. The second year 
800 inquired or applied, 60 were selected for the shops in July, 44 
remained. The third year the applications were about 2,000. This 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 565 

is returning to the old apprentice system with definite instruction 
attached. It adds little to the cost. This movement, of course, as- 
sumes that the very first duty in training for citizenship is to make 
young people self-supporting. The logic of the situation points to a 
broad, new^ plan of cooperation betw^een the schools and industries.^ 

The Milwaukee School of Trades. In February, 1904, a business 
man, F. W. Syvier, urged before the Merchants and Mechanics 
Association the need of industrial education, and asked public sup- 
port. In January, 1906, a school was opened. It soon grew beyond 
the power of this association to support it, and so a special legisla- 
ture passed a remarkable bill widely read and copied, under which an 
added school tax was levied to support the school ; and in July, 1907, 
the entire equipment was deeded to the city. Students admitted must 
be 16, able to read, write, and cipher. Eighth-grade graduates enter 
without examination. A preparatory course is contemplated. There 
is a large three-story building 144 x 50 feet. The school is free to 
residents, but costs the city $225 a year per pupil. There are 4 
trades : pattern making, machinist and tool making, carpentry and 
woodworking, plumbing and gas fitting. Plumbing requires i, but the 
other courses 2 years of 52 weeks per year and 44 hours a week, clos- 
ing only for legal holidays. The conditions of the special trades are 
reproduced as exactly as possible so that the boys work under shop 
conditions. Each is advanced on his merits and not held back by 
the slower boys. Material is charged for : about $4 or $5 a month, 
payable monthly. There is a month's probation on entering ; good 
physical condition is required; and sickness is the only excuse for 
absence. The school does not turn out journeymen, but claims to be 
equivalent to a 4-years' apprenticeship. All work is done from 
drawings. Tobacco is tabooed. Working hours are from 8 to 12 
and I to 5 — 14,464 hours in all. Each trade is equipped for 25 
students, except the machine shop, which can take 40. The equip- 
ment is of the highest possible grade with a long list of machinery. 
The diploma is given whenever the course is complete, and time 
may be saved by ability and diligence. The grade corresponds with 
the pay the graduate will receive when he becomes a journeyman. 
The school is under an advisory committee of 5 citizens, not mem- 
bers of the school board, who are experienced in one or more of 
the trades, but appointed by the president of the school board. They 
prepare courses and purchase supplies. A special tax not exceeding 
half a mill on the total assessment of the city may be levied. Non- 
residents and those over 20 pay $15 a month for the day, and $4 a 
month for the night classes, which is slightly under cost. One 
quarter of the time is given to academic work. 

The Baron de Hirsch School is a short-course trade school. In- 
structors are largely foremen. There are 2 classes per year of 5 

^ H. Schneider. Partial Time Trade Schools. Annals of Amer. Acad, of Pol, 
and Soc. Sci., 1909, vol. 3s, PP- So-55- 



S66 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

months each. Day classes are 8 hours each, or 800 working hours to 
the course. The academic side of instruction is mechanical and free- 
hand drawing, shop arithmetic, illustrated lectures on the theories 
and principles of the trade, and shop instruction in actual perform- 
ance with stress on speed. Each pupil is a probationer for 2 weeks 
to show whether he has sufficient maturity and physical ability. The 
minimum age is 16. There are frequent tests and examinations. 
Classes are admitted in February and August. Applicants must be 
Jews who can speak and write English. Some 60 per cent are, in 
fact, immigrants. There are no fees, but applicants must show that 
they have means of self-support. About 90 per cent of all are wage 
earners before entrance, so that the sacrifice of wage is the test of 
earnestness. The trades are: machinist, carpentry, electrical work, 
plumbing, sign painting; and the academic instruction is designed 
to help the practical occupations. Stress is laid on teaching pupils 
to read drawings rather than to make them. About 84 per cent re- 
main through the course and about 80 per cent have found employ- 
ment in the trades here learned. The average wage of 200 before 
their entrance was $5.39 per week; their average immediately after 
graduation was $7.54 per week; while some started in at $15 per 
week. Mr. Yaldan, the superintendent, found by circular inquiry 
that the quality of the recruits of the industrial army was deteriora- 
ting and that manual training was a failure. The census showed 
that 60 per cent of the employees in manufacturing and mechanical 
pursuits were foreigners or of foreign parentage, and the children 
of natives mostly left school before the completion of the grades. 
From this school, hundreds are turned away each year for lack of 
accommodations, and those who go make sacrifice in the hope of 
future gain and are carefully selected. Evening classes are objected 
to here because with a course of some 22 weeks a 3-years' course 
is necessary to give the equivalent of a 5-months' course. More- 
over, no sacrifice is required, and those who have worked during 
the day are not in the best condition. 

The Vocational School at Springfield, Mass., was opened in 
September, 1909, for boys of 14 and over who had finished the 
seventh grade of the 9-year system and who wished to learn a 
mechanical trade. The school aims to prepare boys to become jour- 
neymen after serving an apprenticeship when necessary. The school 
is in session 6 hours a day for 5 days in the week, closing Saturday 
noon. During the first year the academic work is in the morning, 
shop work in the afternoon. Two teachers, one skilled in wood and 
the other in iron, are employed to teach a group of 25 boys each. 
Academic work is affiliated with that of the shop. 

The Neiv Bedford Industrial School is of high school grade and 
free. In order to enter, a boy must be 14 and have a grammar 
school education or its equivalent. All are strongly urged, but not 
required, to finish the grammar course. This school fits not for 
college nor for scientific schools. The first 2 years are the same. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 567 

The last 2 years are devoted to applied science, drafting, shop work, 
wood and other matters and the course in operating automobiles. It 
will keep closely in touch with employers so that openings may be 
made known to graduates. 

The Hebrczv Technical Institute of New York (1884) fits for 
mechanical trades, but primarily for higher technical institutions. 
The minimum age of admission is 12^. The average age of ap- 
plicants is nearly 14. They must be residents of New York and 
take examinations to the seventh B grade of the public school. It is 
preferred to have applicants who have completed the grammar 
school. All must submit to a physical examination and furnish 
testimonials both of ability and character. Tools, books, tuition, are 
free. Lunches are 2 cents a day or 10 cents per week. Shower 
baths are free, and swimming is required. School is in session 5 
days a week, vacation the first 2 weeks of July and the first 3 of 
August, with half-day sessions during the summer. There are even- 
ing schools for men, who must be 19, and pay $1 a month for ap- 
paratus. All must intend to complete the course and bring excuses 
for absence or tardiness ; and there are monthly reports of attend- 
ance, progress, and character sent to the parents. There is a ref- 
erence and circulating library. The Hebrew Sheltering Guardian 
Society and Orphan Asylum and Educational Alliance maintain 
preparatory classes which fit for the second year. All take the same 
course, which is more general, the first year, and those without 
mechanical aptitudes or physically unfit withdraw. At the begin- 
ning of the third year, students are advised to choose some trade 
and specialize. Useful articles are made and conditions are as near 
as possible those of a shop. Much is done from blue prints. Some 
mathematics, physics, mechanics, electricity, are taught, and shop 
work, including drawing, occupies in the first year 16, and in the 
second 18, hours a week. In 1907-8 there were 288 day students, 
and 84 graduated from the 3-year course. The cost per pupil is a 
little over $100 a year. Seventy-five per cent of the graduates fol- 
low the trades learned here. 

The Fitchburg plan was suggested by the metal trades which 
found it hard to obtain recruits. They studied the Schneider method 
of Cincinnati for university students and adapted it to those of high 
school grade with a 4-year course. There is a 2-months' probation 
in the summer before the school opens to weed out those unfit. The 
first year is given wholly to school, but the studies are given a prac- 
tical, preparatory character. During the next 3 years, the boys who 
elect this course alternate weekly, those who have been in school 
going to the shops Saturday at 11 o'clock to find how to carry on for 
the next week the work of their alternates. The shop work is divided 
into 3 periods of 1,650 hours each, for which the boys receive 10, 
II, and 12^ cents respectively for their work. They have prac- 
tice under direction in the operation of lathes, planers, drilling, and 
other machines, bench and floor work, according to their ability, the 



568 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

wage scale beginning the first day of July. The director, Mr. 
Hunter, voices the manufacturers in stating that manual training as 
fitting for a trade is a failure. It turns out putterers who must 
unlearn much and learn other things before they become effective 
for business. The trade schools now found throughout the country, 
with a few notable exceptions, also fall far short of fitting into our 
industrial system. Their equipment is usually inadequate or anti- 
quated and their courses too cut and dried to make them effective 
in preparing young people for industries. But this method of utiliz- 
ing the actual workshops as an annex to the school system, which 
began in the fall of 1908, so far gives the highest satisfaction to 
business men, parents, and the school authorities. It involves little 
or no expense to the city. The boys make supervised visits to other 
plants, and it is proposed to add paper making, woolen and cotton 
manufacture and any trade where there seems to be a demand. The 
school work of these boys is as far as practicable either based upon 
actual exigencies of the shop or is directed toward those aspects of 
mechanics, physics, chemistry, etc., which are likely to be of service. 
An industrial society conducted by the boys for mental and social 
improvement has been organized, at which manufacturers give talks. 
The superintendent of schools thinks the time is at hand when prac- 
tical courses, instead of being regarded as inferior to the classical, 
will be thought superior. He says that the demand for industrial 
training is so great that " We need not be surprised to hear in the 
near future the criticism that our high schools are mere machine 
shops, instead of the criticism hitherto so prevalent that they were 
maintained merely as feeders to the college." He deplores the fact 
that the splendid high school buildings are in use so little of the 
time and thinks such an expensive plant should be put to use after- 
noons if nof evenings. The boys graduate as journeymen and always 
find jobs. The shop work is vmder a foreman. Boys who prove 
unfit can take the usual high school course. Shop work is given 
for both alternating classes during the summer. 

Chicopce, Mass., has a high school shop 40 X 80 feet. The first 
floor is devoted to the shops and the motor woodworking benches, 
lathes, milling machines, drill press, grinders, gas furnace, hand- 
saw, etc. The second story is for a drafting room. Every form of 
productive work has some educational value and is as much worth 
knowing as Greek and Latin. The Evening School, while under 
the School Committee, is separate and independent under a board of 
trustees. 

W. C. Ashe, principal of the Philadelphia Trade School for 
bricklaying, carpentry, plastering, plumbing, printing, blacksmithing, 
sign painting, pipe fitting, etc., opened in September, 1906, tells us 
that the school began with too many trades, some of which were 
discontinued for a season. The school fs open every school day. 
It does not fit for any higher institution. In the 3 years all must 
spend 4 to 6 weeks in actual work in the trades in the city. The 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 5^9 

average age of enrollment is i6>4. There is an evening and an 
annex' school and a long waiting list. The Board is considering 
opening evening schools of a practical nature in the basement of all 
school buildings. 

The Stout Institute, Menomonie, Wis., is to train eye and 
hand and to give some direct fitting for skill. Certain prescribed 
work involving fundamental and related occupations is given for 
each grade from kindergarten up. Courses for boys and girls are 
largely separate from the fifth grade on. 

The State of Comieciicut has established 2 industrial schools, 
at New Britain and at Bridgeport ; the latter will take boys 14 
years of age. The plan is not yet complete. If the local shops 
take the products of the school shops, the expense will be 
diminished. 

C. B. Gibson, superintendent of schools, Columbus, Ga., has 
done a unique work to meet the demands of the citizens for more 
practical education. This city of 25,000 has 12 cotton mills, iron 
and woodworking" industries. The elementary school had for a dec- 
ade taught manual training and every negro girl (the blacks are 
J of the population) was given a course of 5 years in home 
economics and domestic industries. Poultry, milk, floriculture, vege- 
table gardening, with home life central, are taught for the girls,* 
and the boys are taught blacksmithing, carpentry, etc. The indus- 
trial trade high school, the first of its kind in the country connected 
with the public school system, is open 11 months in the year from 
8 to 4, with a 3-year course. Pupils must be 14 and have finished 
the fifth grade. Tuition is free, but each pays $5 for books and 
material. No foreign languages are taught. The essentials of 
academic study are combined with some trade. There are 30 hours 
of industrial work and 22 of academic throughout. Seniors spend 
the last 2 months in active trades, guided by the school authorities. 
At the graduation exercises each shows what he or she can do. 
Cloth is woven on the stage, for instance, a dress cut, fitted and 
made, and a member of the class returns to the platform wearing 
it and receives her certificate. Five experts in the leading indus- 
tries supervise the school. Incidentally only are graduates prepared 
for technical schools. The school lunch is prepared in the domestic 
department. " Every product has an economic value which cannot 
be divorced from the educational value of the process. The prod- 
ucts are the property of the school and, if sold, the price is con- 
verted into raw material to be used by the boys in producing other 
products of economic value." Excursions to establishments are 
made and discussed. Graduates are placed by the advisory board 
according to their fitness. Perhaps one comes from overalls to 
evening dress for his diploma, feeling that the true American can 
wear either with equal grace. At the commencement anyone in the 
audience can propose a problem or dictate a letter. The cost of the 
school was $100,000. Rich and poor work side by side. The test 



570 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

is the 2 months without pay in the factories where their capacities 
are gauged. The cost is less than the average American "school, 
viz: $18.40 per capita per annum, the average in the United States 
being $46.40. 

Public School No. 100, New York City, under C. J. Pickett, was 
opened in September, 1909. It admits boys under 14 with a gram- 
mar school diploma, or its equivalent if they have mechanical tend- 
encies. The mechanics' trades are taught by 25 carefully chosen 
skilled mechanics. School hours are from 9 to 5. Various wood 
industries, as well as machinery, forge work, sheet iron, plumbing, 
printing, draughting, architecture, etc., are taught. Shop instruction 
is individual and the atmosphere is like that of the commercial shop. 
The aim is not so much to turn out journeymen as to give boys a 
chance to enter skilled industries in a way to shorten apprenticeship. 
The academic course requires less than % of the pupil's time and 
the mathematics, history, civics, geography, and English are closely 
connected with industry. All is in terms of efficiency. 

The David Rankin Junior School of Mechanics Trades of St. 
Louis opened September i, 1909, in a brick, 3-story building with 5 
shops, draughting room, assembly hall, science room, library, class 
room, offices, tool equipment, etc. The regular courses are open to 
men and boys of 16 and over who have completed the seventh gram- 
mar grade. Of those experienced in a trade less schooling is 
exacted. In exceptional cases boys of 14, if they have completed 
the seventh grade, are admitted. They must be in good physical 
condition. There is no set time for the length of the course. The 
school runs from September to August from 8 in the morning to 5 
in the afternoon with Saturday afternoons free. The first year 
there is only carpentry, bricklaying, plumbing, and painting. Day 
school pupils pay $30 a year and a few work it out, though this is 
far from defraying the expenses of the school, which is in a city 
block. The founder insisted that all instruction must be practical. 
There are certificates of graduation. 

The Williamson Free School of Mechanics Trades, Pennsylvania, 
16 miles from Philadelphia, has 24 buildings and 230 acres. It was 
founded in 1888 for bricklayers, carpenters, machinists, pattern 
makers, and stationary engineers. It has its own light, water, and 
sewage plants as well as post office. All who enter must be between 
16 and 18 and must pass a scholastic, moral, and physical examina- 
tion. After probation, pupils are indentured for 3 years for one of 
the above trades. Board, instruction, clothing are free. The school 
is open through the year, but exercises are suspended in August. 
Pupils are divided into 24 families each with its matron and cottage. 
School keeps 8 hours a day, save Saturdays, when it keeps for 3J4 
hours. During the first year half the time is spent in the shop and 
this increases until during the last senior months all is shop work, 
with instruction 3 evenings a week. Work must be rapid and ac- 
curate and time cards aid proficiency. Ninety-five per cent of the 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 571 

graduates enter a trade at once, and probably So per cent with full 
journeymen's wages. 

Trade teaching in so highly specialized an industry as that of 
hoots, shoes, and leather which in this country employs 150,000 
workers with a capital of $25,000,000 and a product of $250,000,000, 
with its many automatic machines and stages, some of which can be 
learned in a day or a week, is unique and difficult. The Lynn High 
School has samples of shoes worth $250 as the nucleus of a com- 
mercial museum; trade sheets are used in bookkeeping; business 
transactions are precisely those of the factory; pupils work out pay 
rolls and cost of pToduction. The high school of another Massachu- 
setts shoe town, Brockton, has a $400 line of shoes to show processes 
and an elective course involving the history of the industry, tanning, 
transporting, chemistry, bleaches, patenting, blacking, together with 
lasting, etc., with most of the training given in the factories them- 
selves, each of which has a trade school for a number limited by 
the interests of the concern. The country factory is nearer the 
school than the large city plant and gets winter work from the 
farms; and then, after acquiring a little skill and beginning to steal 
the trade, the workman goes to the large factory posing as skilled; 
or the factory sends an agent to gather in workers, men and women, 
from the small towns. While an able boy can work his way from 
the bottom to the top, the tendency is to stick to one line of piece 
work. In a single room of the Bedford Street School, Boston, con- 
tinuation classes in shoe and leather work for 40 boys, 2 hours a 
day and 2 days a week, were opened April 11, 1910. This was done 
by and under the school board, but upon request of the leather men. 
The course will stress merchandising rather than the manufacturing 
side of the business. The Beverly idea, on the other hand, is shoe- 
making, with 2 squads of boys of 25 each, one in school and one at 
work, alternating weekly and receiving half the piece price of what 
they do. Thus here, as with other industries in Rochester, New 
York, where 20 concerns, and in the Lewis Institute, Chicago, where 
various firms come in, manufacturers cooperate. In Europe there 
are several schools : e. g., Bethnel Green under the gild of the Lon- 
don Institute and the liveried companies which contribute money 
and advice. Machinery is loaned, material given, and practical men 
teach. There is a general outline of the whole industry. At 
Leicester, England, a good course is given in a technical school 
along with hosiery and plumbing, with weekly lectures on the bones 
and muscles of the foot, designs, estimates of stock machinery given 
by the companies ; while Northamptonshire has the evening type in 
8 shoe centers near by, with full time paid instructors, trifling fees, 
etc. The operative need not know the whole trade, but can select 
his subdivision after some experience. The royal Prussian shoe 
technical school near Diisseldorf is under the government and runs 
8 hours a day for 46 weeks. Foremen are turned out in 6 months, 
superintendents in 2 years. 



572 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

The Master Printers of Boston established an evening school in 
January, 1900, which in 1904 was changed to a day school with shop 
hours. Applicants must be 16 and well recommended; and the 
school hours are like those of the shop, 48 per week. The first year 
each boy pays $100 in quarterly installments in advance. This 
guarantees earnestness. The course embraces book work, jobbing, 
advertising, composition, platinum press work, etc. The school 
takes no orders, but is run purely in the interests of the apprentices. 
Its expenses are partly met by the tuition and partly by contributions 
of employing printers, who constitute a board of supervisors. It is 
well provided with apparatus. There is an apprentice festival yearly 
with addresses and a collation, where the indentures are signed 
which contract for a 4-year course, the first year in the school, the 
remainder in the shop, where the apprentice earns $9 at first ; at the 
end of the third year, $12; at the end of the fourth, $16 a week. 
Thus he is assured of an opportunity to learn his trade well and can 
see his way 4 years in advance and is practically certain of finding 
a good place. It is believed these graduates furnish a high grade 
of skill and faithful service. It is thought a far better place to 
learn than a trade school or a printing office. 

The Typographical Union finding that high specialization did not 
render printers able to teach a trade well, because every moment 
spent in teaching lowered the foreman's efficiency, so that if he were 
warm-hearted he was liable to be discharged, established a system 
known as the International Typographical Union Course in Printing, 
which is devoted to the principles underlying good typography. 
There was great diversity of standards and many disputes about 
taste; and this often prevented capable compositors from exercising 
originality or ingenuity. The course of 30 lessons had usually cost 
from $50 to $60; but the Inland Printer's School sought instruction 
at cost price, the Union doing the advertising and giving a rebate 
at cost price, or $20 with $5 for an outfit. Each student has a right 
to seek advice from expert local printers who have always a wealth 
of subconscious knowledge that comes out on occasion. Students 
jot down on strips what they want to know, and all, even the back- 
ward students, are helped. The Union does not believe in schools 
that turn out inferior workmen or those that become " scab hatch- 
eries " and swell the hosts of the unemployed, which employers 
would like to see. Schools must not be run for profit only or turn 
out half-baked workmen in short courses. This seems to be the 
sentiment of the 50,000 members of this Union with the 700 local 
divisions, of which The Inland Printer is the craft's leading journal. 
Correspondence courses are not approved. 

Donnelley and Sons Company of Chicago (Lakeside Press) 
opened an apprentice school in July, 1908, to teach boys printing. 
They must be grammar school graduates between 14 and 16 and are 
apprenticed for 7 years. A hundred boys carefully chosen from 30 
grammar schools are enrolled. They work in classes 8 hours a day. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 573 

For the first 2 years they attend school daily 3J4 hours and work 
4j^ hours in the various departments. Divisions alternate weekly 
between the school and shop. The work is curriculized and begins 
with the simplest form of typesetting. If a boy keeps a monthly 
standing of 75 per cent for 6 months, he receives a bonus of $25 
payable semiannually. Those who maintain this standing for a 
year receive 2 weeks' vacation on pay. At the end of 2 years the 
boy selects his trade department and works regularly in the shop, 
attending school 2 or 3 hours a week. The school has a library in 
English literature, trade journals, etc. The first year boys are paid 
$2.40 per week or 10 cents an hour for shop time; the second year 
$3 and the third year $5. Wages increase every 6 months until at 
the close of his time the apprentice receives $20 a week. If the 
work is satisfactory they then receive a diploma and are considered 
first-class compositors. 

The Albany Vocational School opened April, 1909, with 50 boys 
and 50 girls and 146 on the waiting list. Most pupils were of the 
seventh grade and about 14. A letter had been sent to their parents, 
who generally desired such a school. The minimum age of admis- 
sion is 12. The course is 4 years with a 6-hour day. The first 2 
years are preparatory and then the pupils decide whether they will 
continue industrial training or enter the high school. If the former, 
they specialize in one of the industries of the city which requires 
preparation. Of the 1,800 minutes per week, 600 are given to shop 
and hand work, 300 to drawing, 255 each to English, geography, and 
arithmetic. In the third and fourth year, 900 minutes are given to 
drawing and shop, 225 each to algebra and geometry, physics, 
chemistry, and mechanics, with 100 minutes to industrial history and 
economics. The 30 hours a week are equally divided between 
academic and technical instruction. Hand work for the first 2 years 
is like that of the local high school, but 15 hours a week instead of 
2. During the last 2 years, work is shaped toward local industries. 
Girls keep house in the kitchen and dining room, furnished in simple 
style, and are taught laundering, cooking, and bookkeeping. There 
is a well-equipped sewing room. History and civics are taught to 
make citizens ; mathematics and the sciences are applied. The 
school is in an 8-room building that does not permit machinery, 
foundry, or forge. The original equipment cost about $2,805, main- 
tenance about $3,400, exclusive of janitor. 

The Agassis School, Boston, originated in letters sent out in June, 
1909, stating that 50 sixth-grade boys who liked to work would be 
selected. Those chosen were divided into 2 equal sections with an 
hour of industrial practice a day. The product must be wanted. 
First boxes used by the school were made. Each boy made a whole 
box and then the work was specialized in from 2 to 6 parts. The 
efficiency of the boys measured by the output of boxes is said to 
have increased about 400 per cent. They were first grouped by 
ability and then a check system traced each piece of work to its 



574 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

source. Groiips were frequently changed. Hundreds of pencil 
boxes were made for high school pupils, and Harvard covers with 
leather backs and corners. The time given to this was deducted 
from manual training, drawing, and arithmetic. Each keeps a record 
of time, material, and output — and this is the basis of arithmetical 
exercises. Industrial words: tools, processes, etc., form the basis of 
spelling. 

At Beverly, Mass., a vocational school was opened in August, 
1909, with 42 boys from 14 to 17, under 2 skilled machinists. The 
United Shoe Machinery Company furnished the shop with an excel- 
lent equipment, in one of its buildings, at a cost of $35,000. Mate- 
rial is supplied at cost and the boys receive a stated price for prod- 
ucts. The city appropriates $1,800 for expenses and it is expected 
the state will double this sum. Boys are in 2 classes, working and 
attending school alternately through the year. The vocational 
school is in the hands of a board of trustees. 

The Portland, Ore., School of Trades, part of the public 
school system of Portland, was established in September, 1908, in a 
22-room building. The school opens at 9 a.m., closes at i p.m., 5 
days a week ; there are 25 minutes for lunch, and the course is 3 
years ; tuition free ; books must be purchased, also overalls and draw- 
ing instruments; breakage of tools and undue waste of material must 
be made good; 15 hours a week are academic for 2 years, and 13 for 
the third year. A boy must be 14 and is supposed to be a graduate 
of the grammar school. All must take academic work unless they 
have had it elsewhere. Then they can spend their extra time in 
the trade work, viz., machinery, trades, pattern making, molding, 
foundry, electrical instruction, mechanical drawing, plumbing, gas- 
fitting, bricklaying, plastering, wiring, cabinet making, architecture, 
etc. When a boy enters, he chooses his trade, and it requires 12^2 
hours a week for the first 2 years and 14^ for the third year. In 
the second year girls are admitted and offered courses in dressmak- 
ing, millinery, domestic science; other courses are to be added. 

Newton, Mass., in 1909, opened a school for boys of the seventh 
and eighth grades who were not going to high school. Provision 
was made for only 18 at first; but probably 50 must be provided for. 
The course is 3 years. Those who enter must practically promise 
to remain until the end. The pupils are from 14 to 17. They work 
30 hours a week, 16 of which are devoted to shop work, which at 
present is only in wood, 4 hours to mechanical and free-hand draw- 
ing, and 10 hours to academic subjects which are related. This 
means 5^^ more hours of work than in public school, and it may 
remain in session till August ist. The boys evidently feel the need 
of this work or the older ones would not seek it. 

The Columbus, Ohio, Training School is part of the public school 
system and was opened in November, 1909, in an i8-room building. 
Boys must be 14 and have finished the sixth grade, but under cer- 
tain conditions this requirement may be waived upon recommenda- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 575 

tions of teacher, principal, or superintendent. Older boys may be 
admitted if there is room, but preference is given to those who want 
to learn a trade because of poverty, death, or inability of the parents 
to keep them in school or who do not like culture studies. The 
equipment cost $30,000; capacity, 350 pupils; 205 are enrolled. 
Classes are limited to 16. Printing, woodworking, mechanical 
drawing, etc., are taught. The products of the shop are used by the 
school. An electrical and machine shop department is to be added, 
a kiln, dry room, storage, etc. Each selects a trade and the drawing 
has a direct relation. If a boy proves not adapted to a certain 
trade, another may be chosen. 

The North Bennett Street Industrial School, Boston, was founded 
in 1880 to train the unskilled masses. Up to 1909 it had registered 
a total of 38,000 persons. The house was first leased, then pur- 
chased. In 1905 a social service house was added near by, and in 
1908 a third. This was a private beneficence of Mrs. Quincy Shaw, 
although the city now contributes yearly $1,300 to the library. For 
years pupils have been received from 2 public schools near by for 
old-fashioned manual training. A 4-page paper is printed monthly. 
The girls' house has a dining room, kitchen, and bedroom, and here 
50 girls not younger than 13 receive 10 hours a week of industrial 
training. - Two points of view — self-support and the home — are dis- 
tinguished throughout. The work here has been lately greatly de- 
veloped and was reorganized on a larger scale in 1907-8. Sixth- 
and seventh-grade pupils chosen from the neighboring schools come 
here in divisions and give 35 per cent of their time to work. Some 
fit for the Boston Trade School. The gain in character, personal 
appearance, interest, and desire to work after school has steadily 
increased. In 1909 some kind of industrial training was given to 
over 600 pupils. Under the direction of A. E. Dodd (1909) the 
membership grew to 1,700. There is a fee of 25 cents for those 14 
and under, 50 cents for those up to 19, and $1 for those older. The 
variety of work here is very great, including toy making, casting, 
stone carving, pottery, etc., and nonindustrial work includes folk 
and round dances, singing, etc., with evening classes for those older 
and from a distance. There are no less than 25 clubs connected 
with the institution, which hold meetings periodically where different 
nationalities, various lines of reading, study, debates, dramatics, 
drill, miniature cities and states, games, stories, history, politics, 
etc., are represented. There is a stamp saving system, also garden- 
ing. This is station W of the Boston Public Library with a circula- 
tion of 73,000 books in 1909. There is also a Research Department 
for the study of the social conditions of the North End. One of 
these investigations was of a grammar school, which showed that 
out of 3,224 girls who entered, only 261 graduated, of whom less 
than 100 entered the high school, from which 20 graduated. Another 
study showed that 29 per cent of the girls during 7 years had moved. 
Another showed that of 135 families, nearly half were more or less 



576 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

dependent upon the work of mother and children; and yet another 
that out of 1,317 owners of property near by, only 553 were residents, 
and of these 32 per cent were Italians and 22 per cent Jews. There 
were 189 chattel mortgages, and 296 tenements in the district. 

The Hampton Institute of Armstrong and Booker T. Washington 
seems destined to 'become almost classic ground for those interested 
in industrial education. It is teaching the most practical occupa- 
tions: carpentry, blacksmithing, tailoring, wheelwrighting, machin- 
ist's trade, upholstering, painting, shoemaking, bricklaying, steam 
fitting, harness making, printing, and tinsmithing. There is a clinic 
or repair shop which operates on broken furniture and carriages, 
and small houses are designed and the cost figured out. There are 
3 cooking classes : one very elementary for girls not likely to be 
there long; one more advanced for middlers ; and still another, with 
a touch of chemistry in it, for those intending to teach cooking. 
The most popular is the sewing department with basketry and lace 
making added, because slovenly work can best be detected in the 
former and the latter best teaches accuracy and care. The academic 
is based upon the practical at every point. Language is first taught 
by doing something to talk and write about, and there are no books 
for 3 months. Mathematics is based on the cashbook, which each 
must keep, showing what the school owes him for work and what 
he owes the school for board. At the end of 3 months his account 
must square with that of the office. Also cost of material, time, 
bills, memoranda for the shop and kitchen are made class work. 
Geography is based partly on industry, partly on current events. 
Drawing is of houses, window boxes, frames, book covers, cards, 
designs made in the school. In the school of gymnastics, measure- 
ments and records of family and home life are kept, with moral 
improvements. In music, folk songs are cherished along with good 
composers. The Bible is of immense influence because the story of 
the children of Israel is so like that of the pupils here. Many other 
schools have sprung up more or less on this pattern — e. g., the St. 
Paul School at Lawrenceville, Va., with between 20 and 30 de- 
partments of industry, with stress on lumber manufactures and 
building. They also make brick, have a granite quarry, and erect 
their own buildings. Milk, pig raising, and dunging are made 
academic subjects. 

The Berea Evening School is fed by the 80,000 to 100,000 negroes 
in greater Philadelphia and, to some extent, by the 12,000,000 colored 
people in the country generally. Twenty-five years ago lots were 
bought, and then a building and loan association established, so that 
this school is a business concern with 2,700 shares of stock and 
$150,000 assets; 200 members own their homes at an average valua- 
tion of $2,000. The school is open from 7.45 to 10 p.m., students 
coming sometimes from such great distances that they do not reach 
home before midnight. If there were room, the principal, Mr. An- 
derson, thinks there would be 500 or 600 pupils. It has no endow- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 577 

ment but is supported by subscription. The colored people are now 
realizing that they must learn to work. 

L. W. Miller describes the Institution of Industrial Art, Phila- 
delphia, established as a result of the Exposition, 1876, and designed 
to illustrate industrial history and serve industrial needs. This 
museum is richest in textiles. The first year is devoted to plastic 
training and the actual handicraft comes later. Its school of textile 
designs, 1884, was the first here, and was due to manufacturers who 
felt they were being beaten in the home markets, despite the tariff, 
and so Mr. T. Search established his courses. The distinction be- 
tween technical and trade instruction is ignored here, and intelli- 
gence even more than manual skill is needed. Pottery, stained 
glass, iron ornament, bookbinding, work in leather, etc., are so 
taught that industrial education shall not become " a tail to the high 
school kite and nothing else, for this kite is already out of sight in 
the clouds of the impractical and the demand for something better 
is insistent." English, the classics, and science are taught only as 
applicable. Pupils must be at least 16, must pass an examination 
and show aptitude. The demand for profitable employment is 
greater here than that for a diploma, which comes at the end of 3 
years. At first the school was supported by gifts ; but the legislature 
now gives $50,000 and the city $25,000 a year. There are free fel- 
lowships from the public schools. The enrollment is about 1,000 
with 40 instructors. 

The Polytechnic Institute of Brooklyn is unique among the 135 
departments and schools of technology of the coimtry. When it be- 
gan half a century ago there were but 6 like courses, and its work 
has been revised to date. Half these students come from the high 
schools of greater New York, entering at the average age of 20. 
The course is 4 years, is adapted to industries, and social and other 
qualities necessary for leadership are developed. Half the studies 
are purely technical and some purely cultural. Engineering is a 
profession, so logic, philosophy, and psychology are included with 
English, history, economics, and modern languages. Lectures are 
given by experts of the Bureau of Municipal Research on the work- 
ing of the government departments. There are evening classes and 
a variety of practical work. 

Principal C. F. Warner describes the Mechanics Arts High 
School of Springfield, Mass., which opened in 1899 on the basis of a 
languishing private plumbers' trade school. In 1907-8 the enroll- 
ment was 396. This was one of the first of its kind, and Cambridge, 
Hartford, Cleveland, and other cities followed. Major emphasis was 
on the shop, but the design was to supplement its imperfect and 
highly specialized training by giving greater variety and ultimately 
to improve the quality of work and increase wages. The law of 1870 
required all towns of 10,000 or more in the state to maintain even- 
ing draughting schools. Two thirds of the enrollment has been in 
the mechanics trades. Tuition is free to residents. Few had not 
38 



578 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

some experience in their chosen Hne, showing the tendency to drift. 
Evening classes are fek to have great Hmitations. 

In Leominster, Mass., in August, 1908, the parents were asked 
by postal card whether they would like their eighth- and ninth-grade 
children to take a more practical course. As the answers were 
favorable, in September such a course was opened to 65 pupils. 
Academic work was given half a day and industrial training the 
other half, alternating each half day. One school building is de- 
voted to it. In addition to the grammar subjects the pupils must 
take bookkeeping, elementary science, and the girls must take sewing, 
dressmaking, cooking, etc. Twenty per cent of the boys chose to 
work either in the shop or at some trade half a day ; and they are 
paid. Articles made at the school are sold ; but pupils are not kept 
on the same work until its educational value is lost. There is a 
need of industrial text-books. 

The Rochester Factory School is unique. In the summer of 1908 
superintendents in factories were asked what preparation they 
thought most fit for those entering their industries. The demand 
was for boys who could apply mathematics to shop problems, state 
what they wanted, had some general intelligence as to sources of 
material, who were able to meet emergencies, not afraid to soil their 
clothes, and could work if alone, and would not abandon their job 
for 50 cents a week more in driving a delivery wagon. Thus 
adaptability and industrial intelligence were the chief requisites. 
Now a boy must pick up his information or owe it to the friendship 
of a workman. He should know something of the theory of his 
trade, the names of tools, materials, etc., be able to read blue prints; 
in plumbing should know the names of the fittings, how to make out 
bills, and something of lubricants, hydraulics, and metallurgy, and 
something of established cost. Then they studied the boy problem. 
There were 824 boys of 14 of whom 542 would not enter the high 
school. The parents of 233 of these desired them industrially 
trained. The course was submitted to the trades and labor council 
and f of the Trade Unions favored it. So a building was pro- 
vided: the lower floor a workshop; the upper floor for study and 
drawing; below 25 six-foot benches were equipped and there was a 
supply of lumber, glue, etc., with circular and barrel saws, joiners, 
planers, borers, etc. School opened December, 1908, with 49 eighth- 
grade pupils and 2 teachers of wood only. In February, 60 eighth- 
grade boys were admitted and 2 more teachers and machinery were 
added. These hundred boys were divided into 4 classes: 15 hours 
a week in the shop, 5 in drawing, 5 in mathematics, 3^^ in EngHsh, 
i>^ in spelling, 1% in industrial history. At the end of the first 
year 85 boys were enrolled and carpentry, cabinetmaking, and elec- 
trical trades were added. Mathematics was industrial; Enghsh was 
business English; 25 words from industrial reports were spelled 
daily; they studied economic conditions in different lands, wage 
scales, laws, organizations of industry. The boys have practically 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 579 

equipped the school. They manufacture public school furniture, 
bookcases, desks, tables, blackboards, sewing desks, and do electric 
wiring. The hours are from 8.30 to 3 with half an hour for lunch. 
The summer vacation is very short. The time card system is used. 
In March, 1909, an elementary factory school was started to fit for 
this, and a school for girls will follow. 

It would seem to be a self-evident proposition that where boys 
are segregated in reformatories or elsewhere because found intract- 
able at home or in school, the very first duty owed them is that 
they should be rendered capable of earning a living when they leave, 
and that some bases of character be taught. The Lyman School 
for such boys, dedicated in 1848, has been 3 times burned, until the 
congregate has been changed into the cottage system with an 
average of 30 boys each, while restraint has grown less and the 
punitive features are weeded out and there is less to distinguish 
it from a farming or industrial school. The boys have laid bricks, 
made doors and windows, have anticipated some of the features of 
the George Junior Republic, have their own currency and bank, learn 
to do farm work and, although committed for minority, may work 
their way to supervised freedom. It is even claimed that, although 
some change their names upon leaving and are lost, the alumni as a 
whole are proud of their relations to the school and like to keep 
them up. Now nothing would seem more obvious than that wher- 
ever a state takes extra control and responsibility, it also has extra 
duties. In many institutions of this kind in this country this is not 
felt. A large part of the time of the boys is spent merely in house- 
work: washing, caring for rooms and otherwise performing utterly 
unskilled tasks which in no wise fit them for useful positions when 
they leave. Here where all conditions can be controlled, it would 
seem as though such institutions might in some respects be models 
of industrial training and could even be made experiment stations 
where methods could be tried out. Many of these boys have excep- 
tional energy, and they seem to me to be more individualized than 
average boys. This involves the duty of studying each with ex- 
ceptional care, in order to find out the proper vocation for each, so 
that he may not only be trained for it but be steered to it when his 
training period is ended. 

W. H. Roe and his wife are conducting a unique Mohonk Lodge 
in Oklahoma, built somewhat Indian-wise, but with stove, cots, 
games, hospital, and designed to be a center for the preservation and 
development of Indian native arts, for which a market is provided. 
Buckskin, sheepskin, moccasins, dresses, dancing skirts, cradles, 
tepee cloth, gilt work, curios, and frank adaptations of genuine 
Indian work for modern life such as golf belts, purses, and picture 
frames, are produced. They work, like the Arapaho and Cheyenne 
women, with awls and fibers rather than with needles and thread. 
Attention is given to the symbolic designs of the Indians which are 
secret and hard to get. At night the Indians gather and play games. 



58o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

A mission church near by induces some to take the " Jesus trail." 
Some relapse to drink, gambling, or the mescal habit; and the sun 
dance, which lasts 6 weeks, often wastes vigor, money, and morale 
acquired with great difficulty. 

Perhaps the best school of horology in the world is that of 
Besanqon (1897), the great watch and clock center of France, which 
was established in connection with the university in that place and 
authorized to confer upon its best graduates the diploma of horo- 
logical engineer. There is a chronometric observatory which treats 
of various motors, escapements, synchronization of pendulums, com- 
pensations, etc. There is also a practical course which involves 
polishing, finishing, making cogs and wheels. Throughout there 
are 7 courses with periods of daily work. (Compare those at 
Waltham, Mass., and at Elgin, 111.) 

The Lewis Institute is a polytechnic school for both sexes, giving 
the degree of Bachelor of Science in Mechanical Engineering, the 
title of Associate in Arts and an Academy Certificate, representing 
4 and 2 years' college work and 4 academy years respectively. There 
are four departments : mechanical engineering, mechanical arts, 
domestic economy, liberal arts. Day students pay a registration fee 
of $5 and tuition of $20 a quarter. The rate for evening students 
is $5 a term of 10 weeks, 2 evenings a week. 

The Cleveland Technical High School, opened October, 1908, has 
a very fine building in Gothic with a girls' and boys' school organ- 
ized separately in the building. It is open to pupils from any part 
of the city. A day has 9 45-minute periods from 8.25 to 3.25. 
School is in session the year round in 4 quarters of 12 weeks 
each. 

J. J. Eaton ^ (formerly superintendent, Philippine School of 
Arts and Trades, now Director of the Textile School in Ludlow, 
Mass.) tells us that industrial education in the Philippines is an 
exceedingly intricate problem. Ironwork does not enter into the 
native houses, which are chiefly built of palm and bamboo, the chief 
tool used being the bolo. Ten thousand dollars was available for 
this purpose in August, 1901, when the first contingent of American 
teachers arrived. As there was no equipment they were formed 
into a committee to investigate the industries of the city, chief 
among which were cigar and cigarette shops. There was much 
marine construction and repair, and skilled labor was mostly per- 
formed by Chinamen. Establishments had to keep about 50 per cent 
additional men on their rolls because the native is disinclined to 
work a full week. Plumbing was chiefly unknown. There were 
few good blacksmiths or wood makers, while wood carving, jewelry, 
tailoring, seemed to show that the native could perform good work 
if it pleased him and was not too hard. Much stress was laid on 

^ Manila Trade School. Annals of the Amer. Acad, of Pol. and Soc» Sci., 1909, 
vol. 2>2„ PP- 89-96. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION S8i 

English. The buildings the Spaniards erected for their exposition 
in 1895 were the first homes of the school, simple one-story houses 
of wood and plaster with tile floors, a mile from the heart of the 
city. About all tools and supplies had to come from the states. 
For months most who entered left after a few days. They seemed 
chiefly to want English and qualifications for clerical positions. 
English seems to have been better learned in the center in a few 
years than Spanish was during 300 years. More than half who first 
entered had been rejected from other schools; many came from 
curiosity. Drawing was a favorite course. The government rated 
success by the numbers on the rolls. Special courses in telegraphy 
were needed and were successful from the first. Shop work with 
lathes, saws, planers and drills slowly grew in popularity. The course 
was 4 years. The Chinese excelled. Three hours a day must be 
spent in the shop, with i additional hour for drawing, and 2 for 
academic work. Shop work increased every year until in the fourth 
year all must be spent in the shop. The Spaniards had charged for 
material and tuition. This was remitted and there were fewer 
restrictions. In 1905 the Manila Trade School or Philippine School 
of Arts and Trades was reorganized. Telegraphy was given to the 
commercial high school. The requirements were much the same as 
for admission to technical and high schools at home. There were 
no pupils under 14, and no girls. Efforts were made to secure prac- 
tical work for all worthy pupils during the summer. Basket work 
and rattan were added. A marine course is needed because many 
boats, inter-island and others, need to be repaired here. English 
has been made a condition of admission. Evening classes have not 
been successful. At one time the city of Manila appropriated 
$30,000 for a trade school, but the city government failed to co- 
operate because the acting secretary of public instruction thought 
pacification, a judiciary, and good roads should have preference. 
Agricultural training is greatly needed. Each town often has a 
special industry. The manufacture of hemp products, the best in 
the world, is carried on in the crudest manner, and there are un- 
limited possibilities of making these marvelously long fibers into 
twines, ropes, cloth, hats, while pottery work should be developed. 

C. W. Cross (superintendent of apprentices in New York 
State) describes the apprentice system on the New York Central 
lines. They have found it very difficult to secure foremen, and 
most roads have no system for recruiting good men.^ The system 
is summed up as: i, close supervision and instruction of apprentices 
in the shop by an apprentice instructor; 2, a school conducted by the 
company during working hours in which mechanical drawing is 
taught practically and where the apprentice is paid for attendance; 
3, a course of problems to be worked out on other time. This fol- 
lows in many respects the educational system of the British Ad- 

^ See I. M. Bashfud. American Engineer, July, 1905. 



582 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

miralty, which has trained most shipbuilders in Great Britain^ 
Large railroad systems now make it possible to work out courses of 
instruction. The pyramid stands on a basis of the rank and file. 
At the beginning there were 12 shops, each of which had from 20 
to 74 apprentices, although work of some kind had been carried on 
locally at 4 points. 

Some 35 years ago an apprentice school was started at the Elk- 
hart shops on the Lake Shore and Michigan Southern, with evening 
sessions, chiefly for apprentices, but which anyone could attend. In 
1901 these were made compulsory for apprentices, who organized an 
association, with fortnightly meetings and reports by committees 
who had seen other shops. In 1886 evening work was started at the 
Jackson shops on the Michigan Central. This was at first evening, 
but was changed to 5.15 to 7.15 p.m. Each class met once a week 
from the first of November to the first of May, attendance being 
compulsory. In 1904 an apprentice school was organized at the 
Oswego shops of the New Yo.rk Central, classes meeting 2 hours i 
day each week directly after the closing whistle blew. Pupils must 
go, but were paid, and this made severe discipline possible. The 
apprentice department of the New York Central was inaugurated in 
March, 1906, at the West Albany shops. It is controlled from the 
Grand Central Station, New York. The boys come in contact with 
shop conditions from the first, each larger shop having 2 instructors, 
one in drawing and one in shop work, all being arranged to allow 
each to progress as rapidly as he can. So close is the personal 
touch that no examinations are held. Often there is a long waiting 
list. Many older men come in to brush up and thus become familiar 
with the company standards. The schoolrooms, with plenty of 
blackboard space, must be near the shop buildings to avoid loss of 
time. There is now an excellent building at Brightwood on the Big 
Four, erected for the purpose, where classes meet twice a week for 
the first 2 hours in the morning. In the New York Central school 
there are now 667 pupils and extension work is being developed. 
There are usually gradations of classes. Very much of the work 
is drawing. Text-books are not practicable, but problem sheets are 
used. Some instructors call at the boys' houses if they are absent. 
The instructor must see they are changed from one class of work to 
another to give them broader views of the business. Supplies are 
purchased in large quantities and usually given, although the boys 
provide their drawing apparatus. Problems are based on gearing, 
steam distribution, valve setting, etc. By better opportunities the 
better class of boys is attracted, and the larger the comprehension 
the greater the interest. There is far less spoiled work. 

N. W. Sample (superintendent of apprentices) describes the 
system at the Baldwin Locomotive Works, Philadelphia, where a 

^ See M. W. Alexander. Plans to Provide Skilled Workmen at a meeting of the 
American Society of Mechanical Engineers. December, 1906. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 583 

scheme of indentured apprenticeship which had fallen into disuse 
for 25 years was reorganized in January, 1901. There are 3 classes: 
first, boys of 17 who have a good common school education and who 
bind themselves, with the consent of their parents, to serve 4 years, 
attend, obey orders, and recognize the supervision of the firm over 
their conduct out of as well as in the shops, and to attend the night 
school during the first 3 years of their apprenticeship. The second 
class includes boys of 18 who have a high school training and who 
promise to serve 3 years and to attend the night school the first 2 
years. And the third class is made up of men of over 21, graduates 
from colleges and technical schools, who want practical shop work. 
The indentures of the first and second class provide for attendance 
at the public school, although many of them go to night schools. 
Each must make formal application in his own handwriting, stating 
his course of study, and submit to a 30-days' probation, and when 
indentured is paid a fixed wage per hour, increasing each year, with 
a bonus of $125 to the first class boys, and $100 to the second class 
boys, if they complete the course. In the first two classes appren- 
tices are not permitted to work on the same process more than three 
months or in one shop or department more than one year. The 
departmental change is every six months. A complete record is kept 
of each boy's conduct and service, which is sent to the foreman when 
he is transferred. The last period of each apprentice is spent in the 
erecting shop. Attendance is, of course, obligatory. Apprentices 
come from all parts of the country. Three years after the first 
indentured apprentice completed his term there were over 200 grad- 
uates, 50 of whom occupied responsible positions. Now it is not 
necessary to go outside for any kind of talent. 

M. W. Alexander describes the apprenticeship system of the 
General Electric Company at West Lynn, Mass. He says that the 
recent unprecedented industrial prosperity has very vividly revealed 
the lack of skilled workmen, and when the revival of business comes 
again this will be still more acutely felt. This company has special 
training rooms for the preliminary practical training of apprentices. 
All, when accepted, must serve a trial period of 2 months, and then 
those who show native ability and a good moral make-up are per- 
mitted to sign an agreement which is based rather upon honor than 
on law. Boys are made self-supporting, and those selected receive 
$5 a week the first year, including the trial period, $6.50 a week the 
second, $7.50 a week the third, and $9 a week the last year. At the 
end of the course they are given a " certificate of apprenticeship " 
and a cash bonus of $100, and the best are invited to remain with 
the company, receiving usually $2.50 or $3 per day. The machinists' 
training room now covers more than 10,000 square feet, with over 
100 representative machine tools. The training room for pattern 
makers occupies 2,000 square feet. While most of the machines are 
of the latest pattern, some are those" relegated to the scrap heap. 
This prevents injury to high-priced tools by inexperienced boys, and 



584 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

gives opportunity for repairing. At the beginning each is under the 
direct supervision of a superintendent of apprentices, who thus 
studies the boy's capacity and character. Some require i^^^ and 
others 3 years to pass through the training room. They round out 
their knowledge and skill on a variety of work. Then some special- 
ize on that for which they are best fitted. The best are given 
opportunities to act as temporary instructors, the general instructor 
often coming in to supervise. The young masters put forth their 
best efforts to impress the boy pupils with their own knowledge. It 
happens that some teach those who have been longer in the training 
room than they themselves. This shows, however, that capables are 
not held back. This instruction is given during the regular working 
time, and the apprentices are paid the same wage during the school 
hours as they would receive while working at the bench or machine. 
While instruction is given in mathematics, physics, technology, and 
mechanical drawing, the problems are practical and selected from 
daily factory life to teach boys to think for themselves. " Through 
practice to theory " is the maxim. Tool designers should be tool 
makers and vice versa. Groups of 15 form a class. Some receive 
instruction from 7 to 9 a.m., others from 10 to 12 a.m., or during 
the first or last part of the afternoon. Of y6 apprentices over 50 
are at present employed by the company. 

Professor R. K. Duncan^ has realized a unique coordination of 
chemistry and industry. A laundry association gave $500 a year for 
2 years for a chemist to investigate modes of saving people's linen. 
An oil firm established a temporary fellowship to study the thyroid 
and suprarenal glands of fin- and hump-back whales of Labrador to 
find the age of whales in which these were largest. The association 
of bakers has contributed to have another problem solved at the 
University. One fellow works on the constituents of crude petro- 
leum ; another to improve the enamel of lined steel tanks ; another 
is at work on new utilities for Portland cement, at $1,500 a year, 10 
per cent of all patents and 5 per cent on all processes resulting there- 
from ; another has $2,000 a year for new utilities for ozone ; another 
is working on a new source of diastase ; and another to utilize the 
waste of petroleum. The work began with the study of the optical 
properties of gas and its chemical composition. The firm supplies 
the money and the student gives all his time to investigate the 
scientific problem designed to be of value to the business. He only 
gives 3 hours a week instruction ; is appointed by the chancellor and 
the professor; is paid in 10 monthly installments. All discoveries 
belong to the company furnishing the funds; the fellow, however, 
receives 10 per cent of the net profits and is regarded as the in- 
ventor. He may in the end engage himself to the company for a 
term of 3 years; and if there are differences, the chancellor arbi- 
trates. The research may be kept a secret for 3 years. Duncan 

^ Western Chemist and Metallurgist, Nov., 1909, No. 11. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 585 

began by a study of manufactures involving chemical processes and 
found chaos, waste, and utter disregard of scientific knov^ledge w^hich 
he ascribed to wealth of raw material, excessive tariff, and great 
talent for business, which supplements waste in factories by shrewd- 
ness in making markets. A few have chemists, but bad facilities 
and worse libraries. The fellow gives a complete account of his 
hours of investigation, signs a legal waiver of all pecuniary interest 
in the^ results and a pledge of secrecy. 

L'Ecole du Livre, in Paris, was founded about a quarter of a 
century ago by the city of Paris for instruction in everything in- 
volving bookmaking. It was prepared for by its founder, M. Hove-* 
laque, by years of study and travel. It is a day school, from 8 to 6, 
with 2 meals; and receives boys of 12 who have finished the lower 
primary. About 100 were admitted first on a competitive examina- 
tion from 300 applicants. There are 17 courses in all, including 
type casting and setting, drawing and engraving of various kinds, 
etc. Only those elements of chemistry are taught which are neces- 
sary for ink making, photography, etc., the science being entirely 
subordinated to its application. The first year all studies are hastily 
passed through and the pupil then concentrates along the lines of his 
tastes and aptitudes. The institution has a large and admirably 
appointed building on the Rue Vauquelin. Instructors of the school 
were appointed by competitive examination. It was quietly in- 
augurated with very little talk and no theorizing, but on the idea 
that modern trades are narrowing and that a workman is far better 
if he knows something of all parts of his trade and all its larger, 
scientific, social, and hygienic bearings. The plan is very similar to 
that of the magnificent photo-engraving school at Vienna, the city 
typesetting school at Barcelona, and was related to the admirable 
Plantin Museum of all the tools and processes of bookmaking, until 
this was excelled. 

In France there are vintner schools and courses for those who 
cultivate the vine, and wine makers' courses for those who manufac- 
ture the many different kinds of wine. These are matters which epi- 
cures discuss with great zest and edification for each other's benefit. 
Processes by which Moselle, Bordeaux, Port, Claret, Sauterne, Cham- 
pagne, are made are elaborate and diverse and require a high degree 
of intelligence as well as special skill and training. Schools also 
for the education of beer and ale makers have been conducted in 
Germany. The processes, too, by which whisky, and especially bran- 
dies, cognacs, absinthe, and the manifold cordials are made have also 
been curriculized. Some of these shade over into the preparation 
of drugs in the education of apothecaries and thus are annexes. 
Southern France has at least two interesting courses or schools 
for perfumery makers, in regions where acres of roses, pinks, 
violets, etc., are found. There is also some instruction in the 
methods of making mineral waters and light summer drinks, also 
mineral and animal as well as vegetable perfumery: musk, cologne, 



586 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

mints, etc. — all these are taught. In several places in Europe are 
special courses for dairymaids, and for cheese and butter makers. 
Schools for the training of policemen, or Polizeiwissenschaft, and 
also for pilots, are most highly developed in Germany. Piano tuners, 
glass blowers, spinners, tax collectors, bootblacks, newspaper sellers, 
sheep shearers, fishermen, makers and menders of umbrellas and 
wooden shoes, judges, journalists, librarians, cash boys, undertakers 
and grave diggers (Belgium), housewives and prospective parents 
(suggested), deaconesses, aeronauts, croupiers (Monte Carlo), 
schools for old people, for treating prevalent diseases, language re- 
form, Esperanto, barkeepers, chiropodists, rat catchers, even pick- 
pockets and thieving, have their teachers and learners, and all are of 
genuine pedagogic interest and suggestiveness. 

One of the boldest, most comprehensive and interesting 
of all the new departures in this field is the now famous 
Munich system, which has transformed its continuation 
schools into elementary technical schools for apprentices. In 
1900 schools were opened for butchers, bakers, shoemakers, 
chimney sweeps, and barbers. In 1901 followed schools for 
wood turners, glaziers, gardeners, confectioners, wagon- 
makers, blacksmiths, tailors, photographers, interior decora- 
tion, painter's material. In 1902 came schools for waiters, 
coachmen, painters, paperhangers, bookbinders, potters, stove- 
setters, watchmakers, clockmakers, jewelers, gold- and sil- 
versmiths. In 1903 schools were opened for foundry men, 
pewterers, coppersmiths, tinsmiths, plumbers, stucco workers, 
marble cutters, wood carvers, coopers, leather workers, and 
saddlers. In 1905 came schools for business apprentices, type- 
setters, lithographers, engravers, building iron and ornamen- 
tal iron workers, machine makers, mechanics, cabinetmakers, 
masons, stonecutters, carpenters. There are now over 40 
of these, besides 3 facultative continuation schools for masters 
and helpers. The former are compulsory and must be held 
sometime between 7 a.m. and 7 p.m. The latter may be either 
day or evening. In Germany great economic and even moral 
advantage is claimed by utilizing Sunday afternoon for such 
and other school work. P. Kreuzenpointer ^ says that if 
Pennsylvania had as many trade schools in proportion she 
would now have 1,000, and this country at large about 30,000. 

^ An Extreme View of the Need of Industrial Education. Amer. Machinist, 
May 20, 1909. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 587 

These schools are usually held 2 afternoons per week, with 
sessions from 3 to 4 hours each and with a term of from 5 to 6 
months per year; the length of the course is 3 years, and the age 
of the boys is from 13 or 14 to 16 or 18. Attendance at these schools 
usually ranges from 20 to 100 pupils each. The trades with which 
most of these boys are employed are always represented in the board 
of control of each school. They, too, furnish most, if not all, of the 
material used for instruction ; and members of the trade organization 
do much of the practical part of the teaching, although the more 
progressive school-teachers have spent much time in studying one 
or more trades. Religion — Catholic and Protestant — is always 
taught. All the arithmetic, e. g., is immediately concerned either 
with the details of the trade or Vvith the practical life of the boys. 
The same is true of the language work, the elements of science, etc. 
The above schools represent the chief industries of the town except 
beer, higher instruction in the manufacture of which is given else- 
where. Munich, although a city of over half a million inhabitants, 
lacks great business enterprise in the American sense. The move- 
ment was inaugurated by the superintendent, G. Kerschensteiner, 
and is described in a prize essay ^ which seeks to answer the ques- 
tion. How can we train boys for citizenship and social life most 
effectively during the interval between their graduation from the 
elementary school and their entrance into the army? He here ad- 
vocates the necessity of training young people to be self-supporting 
as primal, and also that the teens are the most important of all ages 
of life for morals as well as for skill, and maintains that the true 
education at this stage was, and always should be, active. Bavarian 
law compels employers of boys to send them to these schools where 
they exist, so that attendance is compulsory for 6 to 12 hours a week. 
The boy without a job must attend the dwindling old continuation 
schools. The city often gives teachers leave of absence to learn 
some of these trades. The best citizens and tradesmen meet on the 
committees and the children are told a great deal about everything 
that bears upon the trade in question. Some of these schools have a 
preparatory year for those who have only passed the seventh grade. 

The pedagogic ingenuity that has been applied to this problem 
in Munich is great. Every sum, account, bookkeeping exercise, 
every language lesson or composition, all the elementary geometry, 
physics, chemistry, etc., is given a vital vocational form, which goes 
to the very heart of the actual business to a degree that only Booker 
T. Washington has yet realized here. Thus the courses differ with 
each school. The chemistry of the photographer, for instance, has 
very little in common with that of the baker or the leather worker. 

^ Georg Kerschensteiner. Staatsbiirgerliche Erziehung der deutschen Jugend, 
3te Auflage. Erfurt, Villaret, 1906. 78 p. See also his Grundfragen der Schul- 
organization. Lpz. Teubner, 1907. 296 p. I am here under much obligation to the 
author of this system for its literature, programs, and other information. 



588 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

History and geography are intimately bound up with the occupations. 
Trade honor, law, history, organization, are taught. Th,e lives of 
successful men in each calling are told and their lessons drawn, 
and the qualities that gave them prominence are pointed out. The 
relations to other trades, to sources of supply, customers, to the city 
and its ordinances, are taught in a way to foster both local pride 
and respect for their calling. The city chiefly controls these schools, 
which are under the direction of the board and the superintendent. 
Labor questions, of course, cannot arise under these conditions, for 
the boys are learning their trade outside. No true pedagogue caii 
read the rather detailed and systematic programmes, reports of each 
of these schools, etc., without growing interest and admiration, not 
to say fascination, if not, indeed, with a strong desire to take each 
course himself. One feels that a barber, butcher, baker, cobbler, 
and the rest, may be an educated gentleman if he masters his craft. 
The chimney sweep, e. g., is taught about fireplaces, hearths, stoves, 
steam, and other systems of heating, brick, stone and other building 
material, flues, fluted and complex chimneys, their tops, ventilators, 
the physics of air currents and the history of house warming from 
Greece and Rome to our day; he knows all the tools and problems 
of his trade: the chemistry of soot and ash; does problems in tem- 
perature and fuel economics, fireproof construction; studies roofs, 
mortars, devices for reducing smoke and gas, fire extinguishers, 
something of house and especially of chimney construction, laws, 
insurance, police regulations, the use of pitch, plaster, waterspouts, 
etc. ; there is considerable instruction concerning duties, deportment, 
civics, etc. Surely no boy in the later teens who has mastered such 
a course can be called uneducated. It may also here be mentioned 
that there is a large continuation school for girls in two divisions: 
one for household or domestic, and the other for business, training. 

The impression from the study of these German schools, 
which in the last few years have attracted thousands of visi- 
tors to Munich, may perhaps be enumerated and described as 
follows : first, one realizes the great wealth of culture ma- 
terial which can be vitalized by vocational interests. These 
curricula contain each a comprehensive body of facts, laws 
and principles that are of both humanistic and occupational 
value. The broad outlook and the vast surface of contact 
between each calling and the life of the community and the 
world appear. It is surprising to see what a wide range of 
knowledge can be made to be of direct utility, if only the 
right connections are made, how intelligent a successful 
artisan needs to be, and how wide the range of information, 
not to say learning, that can be turned to direct and imme- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 589 

diate practical account and that has here been utiHzed for 
pedagogy. This great fund of what may be cahed expert 
knowledge in the minds of intelligent and skilled workmen, 
of the extent and value of which they are unconscious, the 
very fact that the zests and accomplishments which they live 
by have been discovered by teachers and turned to educational 
account — this gives them added self-respect, as it should. 
They see that schooling is not the three R's alone, but that, 
if their practical lore is curriculized, it greatly augments their 
own sense of its value, to say nothing of enriching the school 
course, the action of which has been not unlike that of a new 
railroad through lands hitherto inaccessible to markets in in- 
creasing the value of its acreage. 

The preliminary survey and the courses that resulted in- 
creased the domain of pedagogy by opening these wide fields 
to which ever since the dawn of civilization most men have 
devoted most of their time and energy. What they have cul- 
tivated here has hitherto met with scant recognition, perhaps 
with contempt, by teachers from Plato down. Curriculized 
knowledge has hitherto run in such narrow channels that it 
has cut too deep to vivify the plains on either hand, which 
have become arid wastes. But now the stream bed is over- 
flowing and its irrigating effects are already manifest. In- 
deed all educational problems are from this point of view 
vastened, until education seems entering a new era with pos- 
sibilities for not only national but human effectiveness greater 
than we have ever had reason to hope for before. We find 
here, too, a growing belief that the world is again likely to 
learn what real teaching is and can do. 

Once again we learn from many observers and reports 
how intensely these pupils are interested and how passing 
well these chosen master workmen with no training in the art, 
can teach, so that trained pedagogy has a great deal to learn 
from them. Put a few bright boys in the earliest teens and 
a capable man in the forties who knows his business and 
loves it together, and we have perhaps the very best possibili- 
ties for teaching and learning, which the world to-day is in 
danger of forgetting. This is just about the age difference 
when normal fatherhood feels the pedagogic instinct most in- 
tensely. It is on both sides the age when social heredity does 



59© EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

its most and its best, when all kinds of tradition and transmis- 
sion are most active and effective. The master here does 
things and thus sets copy for this most imitative age. If he 
talks, it is to explain his acts or deeds. A good artisan prates 
of only what he knows, and does not wander into fields of 
knowledge he cannot command. Thus he speaks not only 
with great directness but with authority, and illustrates, or 
can do so, all he says. To this the very nature of the boy, 
wild though his instincts may be at this age, responds by a 
very high degree of docility. The very boy who revolts 
against a jejune teacher and deserts a dry course, follows the 
man who can tell and show him what he wants to know, like 
a dog his master, and is hardly less responsive to suggestion. 
This kind of teaching is succinct, pointed, curt, epigrammatic, 
its language is yea and nay, it admits of no argumentation, 
but commands, compels, does not coquette for juvenile favor 
or effervesce with the gas of method. Teaching under such 
conditions is indeed masterly, because and in as much as it is 
not schoolmasterly. It is not windy with words, but coercive 
of all that is in the boy, so that there is no part of him left 
to object, and because such authority he loves. 

It is surprising to note, too, how many of these Munich 
boys' parents are in the same trade the boy is entering. Thus 
this system cannot fail to enhance respect for the father's call- 
ing and therefore for parental authority. The boy here is 
not turning away with disenchantment or disgust from his 
father's vocation, is not certain that he can do better in some 
other, and does not wander about and waste the most precious 
years of his life in finding a good opening elsewhere, to be- 
come only a bungler in the end because the years nature de- 
signed for apprenticeship were not utilized. Boys thus at any 
rate escape in the later teens the dawn of the sad and para- 
lyzing sense that it is now too late. Under this German sys- 
tem, the boy becomes self-supporting and marries earlier and 
so probably has more children, is doubtless more content, feels 
more complacency if not pride in his calling, and is more ef- 
fective in it. The boy who deserts his father's trade must feel 
that the latter has been more or less of a failure in it, that the 
experience and deftness that are the chief products of his life 
are not valuable; while if he follows it, it is because the par- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 591 

ent seems to have made a winning fight in the battle of Hfe, 
so that he is accepted and not repudiated as a special teacher. 
Finally, stock school matter and methods are almost sta- 
tionary, not to say stagnant. Much now is as it was genera- 
tions ago, and some things as they were centuries ago. In- 
dustry, on the other hand, is very rapidly changing and, if not 
giving us a new world every year, is transforming everything 
at an ever-accelerating rate. Business and trade are always 
finding new ways, discovering new fields, transforming, super- 
seding old processes, making inventions, discoveries, with the 
number of new patents increasing each decade in almost geo- 
metrical ratio. This is not the same world industrially or in- 
tellectually that middle-aged men were born in. Progress is 
now almost at breakneck speed and is constantly casting many 
things once supremely worth knowing and doing as rubbish 
to the void. When the slow-jogging school is attached to in- 
dustry and trade in a way that really helps pupils to get and 
keep abreast of things as they are, there is of course always 
a strain and a jolt, as if an old stagecoach were caught by a 
rapid trolley or auto. To be and keep modern in the indus- 
trial field means perpetual advance, a readiness to change at 
any time and at any point, and to realize that it may to-mor- 
row be necessary to go back and start all over again. Thus 
it is no wonder that those pedagogues who cling to old and 
routine ways are afraid of push and go, and prefer to row 
about in shallow eddies rather than to hoist sail and push 
out into deep water and central currents. Not a few of these 
just nov/ look upon the tendency toward vocational training 
with alarm, for their pedagogic slumbers are perturbed by 
anxious and disquieting dreams. One of them lately con- 
fessed to me, almost in a whisper, that there was little doubt 
that now there was a widespread, secret conspiracy on the 
part of captains of industry to capture the schools and sub- 
ordinate them to their interests. It does seem at first view 
to joggle the recapitulatory theory which holds that a child 
must repeat, if but rapidly, the long developmental history of 
the race, because here the problem is to take the very latest 
from the very forefront of the advance line and pass it quickly 
back and down to the children and, instead of leaving therti 
in some past stages of civilization, rush them to the fore. 



592 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

But those of us who hold to the phyletic view can, and in- 
deed must, also advocate this ultra-precocious modernism, be- 
cause it is only a part of education which, to be sound, must 
be at the same time firmly anchored to the past, so that no 
good thing in it shall be lost, and also wide open to the future. 
Adjustment to both these claims, when made complete so that 
each is seen, felt, and given its due, is the best training to 
sanity and expansion of soul, just as in religion the optimum 
combination is the most scientific, critical, individual insight 
coupled with the oldest and deepest racial feeling. Either 
without the other is dangerous — the old if unbalanced by its 
opposite makes for stagnation, the new alone for shallow 
neologism. 

These industrial new steps to date mean advance from the 
old uniformity because production is extremely diversified and 
more and more so. With a core of identical matter, special- 
ization in education comes ever earlier and branches ever 
wider. Even in the grades, there is more or less in each 
course leading to one destination that has nothing in common 
with any other. We have sinned greatly against the diver- 
sification and the wide range of variation in the soul itself; 
have assumed that there is one best way when there are in 
fact many, each one best for a certain type of mind, interest, 
or calling; and therefore each more truly educative than any 
other for those it fits. Industrial education thus brings a far 
greater good to a far greater number, and so gives greater 
aggregate advancement and development. It picks up those 
who had ceased to grow and spurs them on again. It saves 
innumerable arrested and aborted life careers; it is all things 
to all men ; it brings down to the grades all the merits of the 
elective system, greatly enhanced and enriched, since trades 
are more numerous than academic departments; it quickens 
faculties that would have slumbered on indefinitely ; it should 
teach the teachers of the old regime that their little kit of 
knowledge and skills which constitute their craft is only one 
among scores of others, each having just as much really hu- 
man and educational value as their own, if not more. It has 
already sent hundreds of the brightest pedagogues to the shop, 
store, and factory to study the new things they need to know 
to giiide this new movement. They realize that business people 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 593 

and craftsmen are always struggling to solve new problems 
in original ways, spurred thereto by the stern necessity of 
livelihood and competition. The motives, too, of charity and 
general weal are thus added to their pedagogic motives. They 
feel themselves a more vital part of a great nation at work and 
not sheltered and aloof from it. Thus, too, the school will 
regain its now losing hold on public appreciation and the good 
will of taxpayers, and the latter will surely if. slowly learn 
that all that has been clone for the public school so far is but 
the beginning of the vastly more it will pay to do, and that 
betimes, in conserving the most precious of all capital and raw 
material: viz., individual workmanly knowledge and effi- 
ciency, till we shall come to understand that the best workman 
is the best man, and that health and deftness of body and soul 
are the most precious parts of the industrial resources of the 
country. 

The psychological beginnings of the movement toward in- 
dustrial education probably go back to Semler's mathematical 
and mechanical Realschule in Halle, 1708, or rather to the first 
Realschule of the present type by Hecker in Berlin, 1747. This 
great movement, which the world knows by heart, had sound 
scientific foundations. Soon after the war of 1870, which 
marked a new dispensation in this field, Germany began to 
devote her chief educational endeavors to industrial lines of 
education, in order that, although a poor country, she might 
develop national power along manufacturing and commercial 
lines. Now, her leadership here is undisputed, and especially 
in the field of applied chemistry enormously profitable. At 
the Badische Aniline- unci Soda-Fabrik alone, from 100 to 
200 university trained chemists and engineers are employed 
to short-circuit and economize processes ; another has 148, 
another 145, another 129, another 128 chemists.^ Some 19 
years ago the English technical college at Finsbury was the 
best equipped in electrical technology, perhaps surpassing all 
others in Europe, but this is now far exceeded by the insti- 
tutions at Darmstadt, Stuttgart, and Charlottenburg, the lat- 
ter costing $2,500,000 and opened in 1884 with Helmholtz 



1 E. D. Howard: The Cause and Extent of the Recent Industrial Progress in 
Germany. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin, 1907. 147 p. See p. 60 et seq, 
39 



594 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

at the head, a fusion of an architectural academy founded in 
1799 admitting- boys of 14 and a technical school of 182 1 
which admitted boys of 12, both being under the ministry of 
commerce. These had declined, and now the new institution 
of vastly higher grade is placed under the ministry of edu- 
cation, receiving only those who have graduated from a first- 
class Realschule or Gymnasium. Fabian Ware says England 
is to-day 50 years behind this and cannot equal it until its 
secondary education is radically reconstructed. 

One reason for the success of industrial education in Teutonic 
lands is a pan-German law forbidding the employment of all chil- 
dren under 17 in factories and workshops, leaving thus 3 years free. 
This was aided by the law of 1901, which declares that all workmen 
under 18 may attend ofificial continuation schools and that local 
councils may make this obligatory, as Saxony has done. Attendance 
is also urged as a public duty for both military and commercial 
reasons ; and love of country must precede individual liberty here. 
The Wiirtemberg law, operative in 1909, compels all localities having 
for 3 years 40 youth under 18 engaged in industrial or commercial 
pursuits to establish a school for them and to maintain it as long 
as the number of such youth does not fall below 30 for 3 successive 
years. The term " industrial and commercial pursuits " is made to 
include factory hands, day laborers, clerks, errand boys, and thus 
is given the widest scope. The opportunity to attend is now given 
day times, rather than evenings, Sundays or holidays, as before. 
Each must have at least 280 hours of schooling per year. Gezverhe 
schools are usually found only in large industrial centers, perhaps 
besides or with the trade schools, the magnificent textile school at 
Crayfield being a good type with its evening, Sunday and day classes, 
most of those students having finished secondary courses. The 
training is in every branch of weaving, dyeing, finishing, and spin- 
ning. There are now 13 Prussian schools dealing with textiles, 
varying with local conditions, e. g., cotton only at Gladbach. The 
Prussian especially has a horror of short cuts, wishes to be thorough, 
aims at the greatest collective ability and to avoid stultifying the 
national aim by individuation as in France. 

Under this system the increased efficiency of German workmen 
has grown rapidly. Our Consul-General Mason at Berlin says that 
our reliance upon superficial education and the natural adaptability 
of young men will, if pursued, neutralize most of the advantage 
which our country enjoys through its natural resources and ad- 
vantageous geographical position for South America, Mexico, and 
the Asiatic trade. The so-called " American danger " in Germany 
has dwindled so that the fatherland has little to fear from our com- 
petition in the field of manufactured goods. It depends more largely 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 595 

on export trade and there is a natural national ambition to " best " 
the foreigner in his own field. This highly trained labor costs less 
than half what it does here and the laborer is tractable and works 
longer. Schneider says : " The efficiency of the American workman 
has decreased during the last ten years." Snowden in his " Indus- 
trial Improvement Schools of Wiirtemberg " says that in the single 
item of machinery and tools, Germany's sales to the United States 
doubled in the 5 years ending 1905 ; while our sales to Germany in 
this line totaled but -J- of what they were 5 years ago. In the same 
time Germany has doubled her exports to England of finished prod- 
ucts and receives only ^ of her former imports. In the machinery 
and tools she exports to Sweden, Denmark, Argentina, and Chile she 
has doubled, to China quintupled, to Canada quadrupled, and to 
Portugal tripled what she sold them in 1900. A pessimistic writer 
reviewing the situation says : " Ten years from now it will not be a 
question whether we shall have an eight-hour day or not, but 
whether there will be any work for all our industrial army." The 
German stress is laid not upon developing leaders, but upon raising 
the average of collective efficiency; and in this, according to the 
verdict of most experts, she is right. 

With characteristic thoroughness, Germany would begin nearer 
the bottom of her educational system, and lay deep and strong the 
foundations which are represented in a type of the Volkschule, con- 
necting with the kindergarten paper and cardboard tents, ladders, 
squares, rings, windmills, baskets, disks, some of which illustrate, a 
little later, fractions and geography, with the aid of paste work, 
swords, kites, frames, bows and arrows, boats; molding clay and 
sand with wooden tools that harden in colors; bricks are notched, 
made into arches, pyramids, hexagons, plinths, coping stones, rough 
tiles, spheres, etc. Then there is work in wood pulp, calico for 
binding, edging, glazed and other papers, ribbon for portfolios, glue 
for album cases, paint boxes, pocketbooks ; also unbroken rings, 
money boxes, letter holders, and caskets. The common tools : ham- 
mer, tongs, pinchers, saw, file, gimlet, chisel, and plane are used ; and 
for woodworking, a cooper's bench of a peculiar pattern, used also 
by wheelwrights with a foot clinch, has been devised ; and grinding 
and sharpening of tools is thought a valuable part of education. In 
Leipzig, too, picture frames, ink stands, key holders, spools, winders, 
shovel handles, harness, pegs, barred gates, milk stools, sawhorses — 
all for use, are made. Carving comes next and is rather elaborate. 
Bent wire, although much opposed in Germany, has often served to 
introduce metal work. Thus are made buttonhooks, mathematical 
slides, bill files, Segener's wheel, centrifugal ring, magnetic needle 
with stand, clamps, tunnels, cups for measuring fluids. Molding also 
had to overcome much opposition at first in Germany, but has gained 
great favor and at Jena goes naturally along with teaching of 
civilization in the lowest gymnasial classes, where the school bench 
is by a very simple device transformed to a work table. 



596 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Very different is the story of this movement in this country. 
Dr. C. M. Woodward/ who if not the father of manual training 
here has done more than anyone to diffuse it, ascribes the place of 
honor to John Boynton who, in 1865, laid the foundations for the 
Polytechnic School of Worcester, Mass., to provide instruction in 
branches essential to life, but not usually taught in public schools, 
with a machine shop on a commercial basis, with 20 branches, and 
skilled workmen to instruct. C. O. Thompson with great originality 
developed a unique combination here of machine shop and engineer- 
ing school. Thi5 was before Delafosse developed the famous Mos- 
cow method. Then came the Stevens Institute with shops in 1871 ; 
the St. Louis movement, somewhat based on that of Russia, in 1872, 
which stressed carpenter's and mechanic's work with drawing, etc. 
At the Philadelphia Exposition of 1876, which marked an epoch here, 
the Russian method had a remarkably clear and definite exhibition, 
and Professor J. D. Runkle promulgated its methods and in 1887 
opened a school of mechanics arts. Then came the St. Louis 
Manual Training School in 1879, reducing for the first time in this 
country the age of admission to school shops to 14, with a 3-years' 
course, and hours equally divided between study and manual train- 
ing. This method lays great stress upon tools. Then came, in 
order, the Baltimore public manual training high school in 1883 ; the 
Belfield school at Chicago in 1884; the Scott manual training school 
at Toledo the same year; this movement was also taken up by the 
College of the City of New York; and the Philadelphia manual 
training high school was opened in 1885 ; and from there on the 
movement has spread very rapidly until there are now about 150 
secondary schools that give more or less of this work and about 
30 known as manual training, technical, or mechanics arts high 
schools. The time given to practical subjects varies from 4 to 12 
hours a week. Some depart more, some less, widely from the old 
cultural ideal. Manual training is now given in more than half the 
1,300 city school systems of the country.^ Nevertheless, these 
schools are too isolated, unpractical, and unsocial with too little prac- 
tical content. These manual courses are rather highly curriculized 
with precise steps, standards, logical order, great insistence on pre- 
cision and stages in the use of each of the 12 tools which are 
stressed with hygienic justification of all the characteristic move- 
ments and attitudes and are generally taught with enthusiastic belief 
that they are at once a grammar, quintessence and open sesame to 
the trades, that they make them as purely cultural and as near a 
liberal education as is possible, although in this respect they are less 
sophisticated and have a much larger proportion of matter to method 
than does sloyd. It was certainly a pedagogic triumph to have 

1 The Manual Training School. Boston, Heath, 1887. 366 p. 
^ A. W. Richards: From the Practical to the Intellectual in the Shop. N. E. 
A. Report, 1902, pp. 550-558. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 597 

passed the challenge of the culturists and allayed their suspicions of 
things useful. Sometimes these manual courses have been directed 
by dyed-in-the-wool classical teachers, as if in order to depurate 
them of anything but purely cultural influences. They are very 
often taken by motor-minded boys, who do not do very well in their 
studies, but can use their hands. There is usually no vital contact 
with the market, for nothing is made to sell, or with the most vital 
needs of boys, for almost never is the plain, obvious law of com- 
mon sense observed that only the end can sanctify the means. Some 
have therefore even urged that young children should make a series of 
toys, and older children a series of simple physical and other scientific 
apparatus. This, it has been said, will quicken the intellect and give 
the right motive to work as nothing else ever tried can do. Indeed, 
this general principle of the end inspiring the means has been 
demonstrated over and over again to the satisfaction of everybody 
but purblind pedagogues, who still persist in having boys and girls 
make joints, links, and a graded course of objects of no use to a 
living soul, but designed only to show the consummate perfection of 
the system. If a little more advanced, boys make tables, cabinets, 
chairs, book shelves and things that the teachers think they ought to 
be interested in, but which are pretty well out toward the peripheral 
limits of their actual zests instead of at their very center. That 
manual training fits for most trades is, in many cases, a preposterous 
delusion. Over and over again, manufacturers have discriminated 
against boys with this training, because they had so much more to 
learn, the importance of which they did not believe in, because they 
must unlearn so much and relearn it by new ways, and because they 
came to their actual job with the conceit of knowledge and skill 
that made them indocile. The manual training movement has done 
and will continue to do the country great and good service ; but now 
that its limitations are more and more painfully apparent, there is a 
great and growing number who believe that its merits will sooner 
or later be seen to have been very partial and offset by defects, and 
that it was really useful chiefly as making headway against the 
invincible prejudice of the pedagogic mind against any training that 
has direct practical value. Instead of the extreme ideal of the 
culturist that school is a place where nothing useful is taught, the 
new slogan is that the school should be a place where nothing is 
taught that is not useful, and that the very first duty the state owes 
to its children is to make them self-supporting. 

One of the gravest defects of this movement is that many of 
these schools do not fit for the next stage of education, and do not 
lead on by direct continuity to the technical schools or colleges, like 
the Sibley School at Cornell or the Massachusetts institute of Tech- 
nology (1865). We have a few rather disquieting figures from 
some of these schools concerning the destination of their graduates, 
the large majority in some cases not even entering any industry or 
anything else for which their course has prepared them. This does 



598 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

not apply to some of the newer or manual training technical high 
schools, where the pupils do go on, but most of these schools classify 
according to, and subordinate the stages of work to, the tool and 
are oversystematic and rigorous, with pedantic strain upon accuracy 
and with almost no connection with science on the one hand, nor 
with the great outlying industries about them, on the other, so that 
they are too abstract. 

A Proposed Substitute for Manual Training. — There is 
a break of continuity between school and shop work, and 
there is more or less antagonism and waste. School-teachers 
can never learn to teach a trade well, and foremen can never 
teach it in a way to entirely satisfy the pedagogue. Moreover, 
the contrast in passing from one to the other is extreme and 
confusing to the pupil, so radically different is the method and 
spirit. Although the plan of Columbia to train shop fore- 
men to be teachers on the one hand, and while the Labor 
Unions on the other, might do very much, there will probably 
always be need for some intermediate institution to link the 
two. Manual training has sought to supply this bridge from 
school to shop, and, while many have traversed it, it was badly 
constructed, its very plan was temporary, and it is now totter- 
ing. Its too sudden demolition just now would be disastrous ; 
but in view of this situation, there is one new departure that 
has often been suggested, many elements of which have been 
successfully tried, some here, some there, which has always 
lain very near my heart and which it is now high time to 
have seriously tested in some experimental way : viz., a cur- 
riculum of toy making for lower, and simple scientific ap- 
paratus for higher grades. This would be a far better in- 
troduction to shop schools, would have the great advantage 
of beginning during the years when most boys now leave 
school, and would attract them to stay. It would naturally 
and easily correlate with the playground movement, for many 
implements for many games could be made. It would be re- 
capitulatory and humanistic, for most of the best plays and 
games are dwindled and ancient forms of adult occupations, 
so that in play the child is, in a till lately undreamed-of sense, 
repeating the history of the race. The toys which are offered 
to American children are a disgrace and insult to the true 
nature of childhood. Instead of being masterpieces of sim- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 599 

plification of everything possible that adults care for, they are 
machine-made, monotonous, cheap, antique, and utterly fail 
of the true purpose of toys, which is to introduce the child to 
adult life smalled down to the dimensions of his mind and 
hand. By the method here proposed, the products would be 
used by the maker. They could never interfere seriously with 
markets or prices, and would appeal strongly to the imagina- 
tion and intellect, which are vastly further developed in chil- 
dren than their power to produce. One of the capital errors 
of most schemes of industrial education is that the appeal is 
mainly limited to the hand, and the vastly greater power of 
the child to appreciate and understand than to do is not recog- 
nized. I would lay it down as a law of universal application 
that in every course of manipulation, no matter how practical 
and laborious, three quarters of the appeal should be to the 
interest and intelligence of the child, which is far in advance 
of, and growing far more rapidly than his manual power dur- 
ing the few years that just precede and follow pubescence. 
Manual training courses directly tend to divorce mind and 
hand. The impression of labor it leaves upon the pupil's mind 
is that it is monotonous, mechanical drudgery with pedantic 
insistence upon accuracy, and is pretty remote from utility. 
Over against all this, most of the brain work of most of the 
best minds of our age and its very heart and zests have been 
given to agriculture, manufacture, and commerce. Here the 
struggle for survival has been most intense. Manual training 
has proven itself notoriously lacking in appeal to head or 
heart. It is a depressing and woeful introduction to what 
will be to most the business of life. This is all the sadder 
because somewhere along the lines here indicated lie the 
rich mines of native and long ago stored-up, human in- 
terests which, if we can only find and work them, will 
run the whole educational machinery during these most 
critical years with astounding energy and with incalculable 
economy. 

The primal spur to all industry was and is to own and 
use the finished product. This was and is the goal and in- 
spiration and the process was only a means to that end. 
Utensils, shelter, dress, ornament — all were desired, and sO' 
man set to work to make them, and he was interested in his 



6oo EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

toil just so far as it gratified his wish. Our educational 
methods divorce these two and so resemble slavery, because 
the children have no usufruct of their efforts. Often the 
things they make are for exhibition purposes only or are 
owned by the school or for its use, in which their zest is in 
large degree an artifact. Possibly it is for their parents or 
the home or, at best, is sold and they may have a share of 
the price. The utilities to which the products of the school 
factory are put are rarely what they want so badly that they 
welcome the effort it takes to make them. The results, to be 
sure, are more tangible than those of book study; but is it 
not an obvious commonplace that it makes an immense peda- 
gogic difference what they make, and that the best results are 
really where the finished handiwork plays a vital role in their 
lives ? Play is their strongest passion ; hence their first in- 
terest is to use, and the next to obtain money to buy, what 
they wish. It would seem therefore to be a sun-clear prin- 
ciple that their first industrial endeavors should be directed 
toward making toys, alloyed with only as much educational 
value as they can take without loss. Play is now happily 
coming to its own; and the upper grammar grades represent 
the point of chief bifurcation between play and work, so that 
the latter develops best where the play impulse can be most 
directly turned on and this difference obscured as long as pos- 
sible. To work at a favorite toy is playing at work ; and this 
is needful to bring the best that is in the boy to bear. Even 
tools and implements of reduced dimensions or simplified are 
toys. The greater the number and variety of these he has 
smalled down and elementarized to the dimensions of his hand 
to make, his mind to comprehend, and his power to use, the 
more valuable the educational process. Thus in these days 
of happy renaissance of playgrounds, plays, and games, we 
find our urban children need to be taught how and what to 
play, and so industrial education should have, as one of its 
earliest chief ends, to help in this process. Hence the more 
and better the children work, the more and better they should 
play. A rich chapter of psychology might here be written 
from well-established data, were proof of this principle nec- 
essary. 

What then is the practical proposition to use this impulse 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 6oi 

here? It is nothing less radical than to supplement most of 
both sloyd and manual training as now current by a course 
in toy making in the earlier, and in simple scientiHc instru- 
ment making in the later, stages of preliminary industrial edu- 
cation before the time has fully come to train in specific in- 
dustries ; and thus to bridge the way from school to shop more 
effectively than is now done, as well as to help fill up the at 
present half-wasted years below and even into the teens. This 
is perfectly feasible and would involve far less loss or even 
change than might at first seem of material organization, etc., 
and it would bring immense pedagogic reinforcement, both 
during this stage and in its later after-effects upon the en- 
tire spirit and method of adult labor, so that I cannot see 
why it should not be begun at once. The first step is tO' in- 
ventory the children's interests, visit toy shops, find out the 
resources of the various nations most in advance of us in toy 
making, like Germany, Japan, and France, and, laying other 
races and ages under tribute, to select with the greatest care 
each object to make, until we are certain of the pedagogic 
justification of everything and, when a list is chosen, curricu- 
lize it according to age, taste, and difficulty, and proceed to 
realize the scheme. The extent of the resources in this field 
is now amazing. As a nation, we are at a very low ebb, or 
have been till lately, in both the will and the way of adapting 
things which adults use to childhood or reducing men's work 
to boy's play. Besides toys now actually in use in various 
parts of the world, the recent rapid progress of invention and 
science has opened vast new possibilities here, that are as yet 
nowhere improved for the young as they would be, were 
we not so engrossed with mature occupations to the unprece- 
dented neglect of the young. Even the possibilities within 
our reach are little known and still less utilized. I am, of 
course, far from being able to lay down here what should be 
done in detail, for this would require a long, careful, and 
cooperative survey, although some things in the right direc- 
tion may be roughly indicated. A properly chosen committee 
in a year or two of investigation could open up a broad, new 
way for education. Indeed, toy exhibitions and congresses, 
as they have been held in Europe, would of course give great 
stimulus and aid. 



6o2 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

It should be premised and never forgotten that from the 
standpoint of industrial education the recorded history of the 
race has not yet been utilized aright. Dewey's efforts in 
Chicago years agO' to lead young children over the pathway of 
the history of labor were exceedingly ingenious and sugges- 
tive, even if there was only a limited adaptation of phyletic 
to ontogenetic. Paleolithic and Troglodyte periods hardly 
correspond to the stone cutting or masonry of to-day. The 
so-called Bronze Age, so far as we know, is not very much 
represented in childhood. Possibly clay modeling and the ele- 
ments of pottery belong rather early. It may be that the mold- 
ing and hammering of lead and whittling belong here; and 
significant too are the lessons drawn in Chapter I from the 
first zests of children in points, edges, strings, clubs, and 
things to strike with. The Nomad Age is better represented 
in truancy and runaways, and suggests excursions. The 
Hunting Age correlates with the sling, crossbow and fishing 
passion. No boy ever invented a boomerang. Domestication 
is represented by pets, and perhaps by the horse school of 
California; it may be by keeping bees, pigeons, dogs, etc. 
In weaving, skin dressing and cloth making, as well as shelter, 
we doubtless have atavistic motivations from the tepee up. 
Play in general is the rehearsal in the midst of our own life 
of very ancient paleopsychic activities which belong earlier in 
the race. Thus, on the whole, I believe the very best possible 
practical field for the recapitulation theory is just at this stage, 
and that, therefore, we should find powers at our disposal, 
could we learn how to turn them on, that would enable us to 
develop before and perhaps a little into the teens the very best 
liberal and humanistic basis for later special training that in- 
dustrial education can ever possibly expect to have. 

I append a few simple hints whacked together at my writing 
desk in the most reprehensible way like other abstract study courses 
with no test of experience, but which may serve to illustrate how use 
should dominate. I would give to a group of boys in a school a shop, 
which should be very meagerly furnished at first so that tools be 
kept in the background instead of pushed to the fore, roughly sawn 
slats, show them a good pattern and demand that they make a yard- 
stick, foot-rule, and some of them a lo-foot pole, so that we could 
measure the yard, room, desk, blackboard, their own height, width, 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 603 

street, sidewalk, halls, running tracks, etc. Although saw, plane, 
scratch awl, and square should be at hand, I would allow them to 
whittle freely with a jackknife if they preferred. They should be 
told a little, and shown more about laying off feet, inches, and 
fractions, and to use the metric system on one side. I would lay 
great stress upon exactness, not at all in finish or angles, but only 
in lengths. Then each should measure with the standards he had 
made and make simple computations, always having several indi- 
viduals on each task for comparison. The measuring instinct is 
strong in boys and it might be applied to anything else they chose. 
The results would, of course, bring out many personal differences in 
the exactness of both the use of standards and the workmanship. 
Those who thought they could do better might try again if they 
wished. On this work, considerable mathematics might be based. 
Then I would have them make a wooden square and a pair of rude 
compasses, the latter with whittled joints and pegs with the use of 
a gimlet, with a pin point at the end of one arm and a hole for 
chalk or pencil at the other. Very clumsy it would be, and each 
might try again; but if it were a true square and if the compass 
could be made to draw a true circle of different sizes, it would do, 
because all is for use and nothing for ornament or exhibition and the 
contrast with good models, which should always be at hand, would 
have its own lesson. The compasses made by different boys should 
have a large range of size. Each boy should show what his instru- 
ment can do on paper, the blackboard, the floor, perhaps the yard, 
and various exercises in construction and grouping could now be 
done combined with the rule. Other ways of making circles should 
be demonstrated at " the circle age " now known as the nascent 
period when it occasionally becomes an obsession. Relations should 
be pointed out to the ellipse, cylinder, cone, and how to make and 
draw these and also spheres. 

Next perhaps the boys should learn to mortise or otherwise 
fasten cross sticks together at right angles and support their ends 
as frames for kites ; and this would open another most meaty chapter 
for the boy, whose very heart follows wherever the work of his 
hands goes. When they had made kites of different patterns that 
would go, I would appeal strongly to the intellect. Every good kite 
hook should be at hand and each should be given something to read, 
with an opportunity to pool his knowledge for the benefit of others. 
The youthful mind is essentially docile. It is far more receptive 
than it is active — a truth which nowadays our industrial educators 
are prone to forget because, although all children are more or less 
motor-minded, the very essence of childhood is its exorbitant capac- 
ity for intake of impressions. Depending on a rank crop of inter- 
est, I should expect to reap very speedily in this rich soil, if properly 
sown and cultivated. I would linger here and branch out a good 
deal to parakites, box-kite patterns, and many details. Something of 
history would encourage efforts to imitate or even parody as many 



6o4 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

things as have been done with kites as is possible.^ Thus skill with 
the fingers should be harnessed to the development of the cerebral 
neurons, as it should always be, for thus only are we working in 
the depths and not in the shallows of the soul. The hoy's reading 
should thus he stimulated, an inner eye back of the retina opened ; 
and that priceless, although semiconscious, education which is by 
hints and suggestions and is far more rapid and indelible than any- 
thing in the examinable memory regions of the soul goes on by 
leaps and bounds. Here kites often have their season, as in Japan 
it is March when the sky is filled with many patterns of them, flown 
with a high degree of skill by clubs and at festivals. There are 
many devices, methods, colors of covering, modes of controlling 
dives and swirls, steering, self-registering springs, belaying and fric- 
tion cleats, speeders, modes of measuring the angle of elevation, 
signal alphabets and codes, the box kite adapted by Hargrave from 
the Japanese one-celled prototype, W. A. Eddy's improvement on the 
Malay kite, Chanute's ladder kite and tandem system, J. B. Millet's 
observation kite,' Wise's methods for night signaling,^ life-saving 
kites and their stories, kites carrying telegraph and telephone wires,* 
modes of recording pull, the results of the study of layers of the 
air,° e. g., that the Boston east wind rarely has a depth of more 
than 1,200 feet, and that approaching changes of temperature appear 
6 to 12 hours earlier i,ooo feet up than they do on the ground, 
upward and downward eruptions and thrusts of air strata, the ratio 
of altitude to the barometer, the attention birds often give to kites, 
their use in towing boats, modes of guiding them by springs that 
Baden-Powell used with his kites, the largest of which was 36 feet 
high, duplex kites or relays to buoy a line, kites as drawers of carts, 
their use by W. L. Moore, of the Weather Bureau, who, as a result 
of 3,835 observations at 17 different stations, found the reduction in 
temperature about 5 degrees for each 1,000 feet of altitude, these 
gradients being greatest in the afternoon.'' 

One of the most mind quickening of all domains of contemporary 
interest and activity is the story of the conquest 'of the air. No one 
knows the origin of kites. That the wind will lift and sustain a 



1 See G. T. Woglom: Parakites; a Treatise on the Making and Flying of Tail- 
less Kites for Scientific Purposes and for Recreation. New York, Putnam, 1896. 
91 p. 

2 Scientific Kite Flying. Century, 1897. Vol. 32, pp. 66-77. 

^ H. D. Wise: Experiments with Kites. Century, 1897. Vol. 32, pp. 78-86. 

^W. A. Eddy: Photographing from Kites. Century, 1897. Vol. 32, pp. 
86-91. 

5 A. L. Rotch: A New Field for Kites in Meteorology. Science, 1901. N. S. 
vol. 14, pp. 412-414. Also his Meteorological Observations with Kites at Sea. 
Science, 1901. N. S. vol. 14, pp. 896-897. 

« E. Milarch: Aus dem Reich der Liifte. Bonn, Georgi, 1908. 155 p. E. 
Rumpler: Die Flugmaschine. Berlin, Braunsbeck & Gutenberg, 1909. 327 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 605 

light and tethered plane must have been discovered again and again. 
From the kite festivals of China and Japan with their sportive and 
even religious symbolism to the compound kite systems that lift men 
hundreds of feet, and photographic and other scientific apparatus 
miles into the air and bring us knowledge of topography below and 
aerial conditions above, is a long wonder tale of mingled play and 
scientific interest combined in unique, if not ideal, pedagogic pro- 
portions. Then comes the chapter of balloons, from those of toy 
dimensions up to the great crafts that compete under the direction 
of clubs. More recently came the era of dirigibles culminating in 
the airship of the Zeppelin type, almost as long as a man-of-war 
and carrying 15 or 20 persons with half a ton or more of ma- 
chinery and accouterments, sailing in the teeth of a strong wind 
and already in Munich making regular trips with an established fare 
for passengers. The aeroplane of the Wright-Paulhan fashion has its 
own chapter. All this has involved many new legal questions, not 
only as to patents, but as to the rights of property owners to the air 
above their land, the damage done by dropping ballast and garbage, 
landing in fields, the danger of collision, rights of way, etc. There 
are almost unlimited military possibilities involved: by their aid 
soldiers can attain knowledge of the enemy's forts and positions and 
may be able to drop bombs on ships and cities from heights beyond 
rifle range, new vertical guns are invented and serpentine courses 
laid down most likely to avoid their aim; curiously, too, not a few 
practical principles entirely unknown before have been accidentally 
discovered, and there is already a short but pathetic list of martyrs 
who have lost their lives in experimentation, to say nothing of the 
saddened, if not shortened, career of Langley, who, despite the news- 
paper ridicule of his failures, contributed more knowledge and did 
more to give these problems scientific standing than any other. 
Several eminent authorities had deliberately declared, too, that 
various achievements now actually accomplished would be impossible. 
Now the point to which I invite the attention of every reader 
and challenge every critic is this : while we have been quick to 
discern the commercial possibilities of financial gain and have al- 



A. Hildebrandt : Die Luf tschiffahrt. Munich, Oldenbourg, 1907. 426 p. George 
Wellner: Die Flugmaschinen. Vienna, Hartleben, 1910. 152 p. W. deFon- 
vielle: Histoire de la Navigation Aerienne. Paris, Hachette, 1907. 270 p. H. 
Delacombe: The Boys' Book of Airships. N. Y., Stokes, 1909. 244 p. R. P. 
Heame: Airships in Peace and War. N. Y., Lane, 1910. 324 p. A. Lawrence 
Rotch: The Conquest of the Air. N. Y., Moflfat, Yard, 1909. 192 p. A. Hilde- 
brandt : Airships Past and Present. London, Constable, 1908. 364 p. Alphonse 
Berget: The Conquest of the Air. N. Y., Putnam, 1909. 295 p. Hiram S. 
Maxim: Artificial and Natural Flight. London, Whittaker, 1908. 166 p. Victor 
Lougheed: Vehicles of the Air. London, Unwin, 1910. 479 p. A. Haenig: 
Ballon- und Flugmotoren. Rostock i. M., Volckmann, 1910. 196 p. Neumann: 
Die intemationalen Luftschiffe, 1910. Oldenbourg i. Gr., Stalling, 1910. 102 p. 



6o6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ready several rival stock companies, and while every newspaper in 
the land has exploited to the uttermost every sensational achievement 
and possibility in all the stages of this remarkable development, not 
one of all our pedagogues has made any effort worthy the name 
to utilize the great, new, manifold, educational resource here opened. 
The appeal to youthful interest is intense, and the latter could absorb 
a whole sheaf of principles of physics in the easiest, simplest, and 
most effective way. From the mechanics of the air to the gasoline 
engine which made dirigibles possible, there is a' culture-history value 
for developing intellect and also for creating industrial zests and 
even activities. Magazine writers have exploited phases of the 
topics here involved of which a few libraries have made convenient 
lists, and a few alert pedagogues here and there have tried to turn 
on the high-pressure power of interest to enrich the programme. 
Very few English writers have deemed it worth while, and no 
teacher has been possessed by the idea that boys have a right to 
have this matter sifted, adapted, and illustrated. In Germany this 
need has been recognized and there are a number of interesting 
handbooks written by those who have realized that this new develop- 
ment involves new duties to the young; but none of these have yet 
been translated. If they only had a little more consciousness of 
their own real needs in this respect, boys would organize a strike 
or formulate and present to the teaching body a bill of rights de- 
manding that they no longer be kept in ignorance or left to snap 
up only the scattered crumbs of information on a subject in which is 
focused now so much interest on the part of business men, capitalists, 
lawyers, physicists, meteorologists, and mechanics. As it is, most 
of the wealth of boy interest in this contemporary field is allowed 
to go to waste for pedagogy, and the psychological opportunity for 
mental stimulus and fertilization is lost. Boys might not unjustly 
almost imitate the spirit of the barons of Runnymede and demand 
knowledge, as they did rights, withheld from them. That no one 
has it in his heart to tell the boys, to proclaim the glad tidings from 
the frontier, to animate them and to find his reward in the eager 
attention and intellectual uplift of it all to them, that no teacher 
burns to impart it or sees its culture value, is only another expression 
of the sad fact that we have lost contact with the nature and do not 
serve, or even see, the needs of the young. 

Another excellent object, that the experimentalists in industrial 
education try out, is the making of puppet theaters. Teachers have 
lost sight of the possibilities here which a century ago loomed so 
big in Continental Europe, especially in Germany. The wood, paste- 
board, cloth, thread work, and perhaps some of the figurines could 
be made; and this prelude would involve literary knowledge while 
the manual skill needful to operate these shows would have a place. 
The revival of this lost art would need a little fostering care at 
first, but would be well worth trying, here and there at least, as an 
annex to supplement industrial training. If a suitable interest could 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 607 

be aroused, it would be a rare and precious combination of hand 
work and literary, historical, and art interest in excellent pedagogic 
proportions. The life of Goethe shows its influence on certain supe- 
rior types of juvenile mind, while the famous Munich puppet show, 
which still survives, shows the charm of simplified drama for chil- 
dren, who might participate in as well as see productions. 

Another strong boy interest is that in firearms. This is intense 
and often leads lads to obtain pistols surreptitiously, to use them 
both as toys and in earnest. The owning and perhaps use of a 
" gun " at the age when this interest culminates, the thrilling mo- 
ment in melodrama when, perhaps at the hands of a feeble girl or an 
avenger, the villain is foiled, makes a dramatic situation that was 
impossible before. It gives the weakest, smallest, and fewest power 
against the strong and the many, and makes virtue and vice, as the 
case may be, triumphant. We need, too, gun books on pedagogic 
principles to intellectualize and sublimate this now wasted and de- 
graded instinct. It should tell in clear and simple language and with 
copious illustrations the story from the invention of gunpowder to 
Krupp, describe all the stages, the manifold tests, the experiments, 
the manufacture, the improvements in rifles, the methods of studying 
the force and range of projectiles, their use and abuse in war and 
peace, with subtle moral suggestions about personal combat, honor, 
the slaughter of game, etc., interest in target shooting, records, 
modes of warfare, great battles, innumerable hints as to processes, 
and the business methods involved — all this might be set forth in a 
way to give contact at every point with the natural fascination boys 
have in man's recently acquired power of hurling missiles of death 
with accuracy at great distances. This should be perhaps introduced 
by an anthropological chapter on bows and arrows, and even spears 
and javelins hurled by arm power, modern bow-shotting clubs, etc. 
Such a book could be constructed that would do very much to lay 
betimes in the youthful soul the foundations on which the aims of 
all peace and arbitration movements might be advanced. If peda- 
gogy were a real muse to-day this would be a most acceptable 
offering to lay upon her shrine. It is easy to imagine how, rightly 
presented, this might make even a gang leader sit up and take 
notice, and become almost a veritable Bible among the hunkies. In- 
stead of this, we have here again a great and natural pedagogic 
power going to waste or worse, because we are not in earnest in the 
matter of doing our best with and for the young. Our educational 
instincts are suffering atrophy, our sense of responsibility is conven- 
tionalized and rutty, and what might be an intellectual spur is ig- 
nored and the motivation may in extreme cases even take a crim- 
inaloid form. 

What has been said above, e. g., about aerial navigation for boys 
might be said of many other things. In many cases only part of 
the toy or apparatus could be^ or would need to be, made in order 
to get its educational value. Tops open the secret to some of the 



6o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

profoundest problems of nature, and an eminent physicist friend 
insists that boys could easily make a Maxwell top and could record 
some of its wonderful gyrations, and that nothing would lead so 
strongly and directly from sense to reason. A graded course in tops 
alone would incite curiosity in everything that spins or rotates and 
would contribute to build apperception organs for vortexes, atoms, 
and stellar systems, later. The stimulus here would be very great. 
Among German toys are steam engines that both go and reverse ; 
and all this leads over by insensible gradations to illustrative ap- 
paratus; for natural history, bugs that creep, birds that fly, monkeys 
that climb, soldiers that march, thrust, shoot; boats with wheels and 
rudders, flowers opening to the bee and springing like a Venus's fly 
trap. On processes like these, too, the basal principles of mechanics, 
acoustics, optics, magnetism, and all the rest, of which algebraic 
formulae are the scientific language, could be illustrated. The fol- 
lowing apparatus in physics has been made in schools as a propadeu- 
tic to industrial training: color discs, vibratory rods and plates, 
siphon, sucker, spyglass, Magdeburg hemispheres, vernier, hour glass, 
balance, pendulum, thermometer, barometer, monochord, apparatus to 
show expansion, evaporation and certain hydraulic laws, chark or 
fire drill, the pith-ball apparatus, magnets, electric keys, telegraphs, 
various optical illusions. R. S. Baker ^ has a very pedagogic intro- 
duction to popular science. First there is a voyage on the sea 
bottom in a submarine boat, the Argonaut, which can rise or sink, 
run on the bottom on wheels, has openings for divers, etc. The 
second chapter describes liquid air, with all the steps from Pictet 
in 1879 on to liquid nitrogen by Dewar, and just how Tripler does 
it, and how it behaves. Then comes the story of Marconi, his suc- 
cesses and difficulties to date. Motor vehicles, X-ray photography, 
and the phonograph, with plenty of personal storiology, complete 
the volume. D. C. Beard " follows the seasons for his amusements ; 
spring is for kites, fishing, aquaria, flower and house gardens; sum- 
mer, for knots, hitches, loops, water telescopes, tangles, trawls, 
boats and rigging, soap bubbles, camping, bird keeping; autumn, for 
traps, dogs, taxidermy, camera, drawing, photography; winter, for 
snowballs, houses, sleds, sleighs, ice boats, snowshoes, skates, 
phonographs, puppets, kaleidoscopes, fantastiscopes, costumes, etc., 
all with plenty of parts and things to do and make to train the hand. 
Cassell's book^ is copiously illustrated with diagrams for cricket, 
football, polo, tennis, golf, baseball, aid to the injured, swimming, 
boxing, fencing, hoop, marbles, archery, wrestling, rowing, bowling, 
croquet, quoits, billiards, chess, backgammon, checkers, experiments 
with heat, light, sound, in chemistry, mechanics, geological recrea- 

'The Boys' Book of Inventions. New York, Doubleday, 1899. 354 p. See 
also his Boys' Second Book of Inventions. N. Y., McClure, 1903. 

2 What to do and How to do it. N. Y., Scribner, 1882. 391 p. 

3 Book of Sports and Pastimes. N. Y., Cassell, 1904. 973 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 609 

tions, wood and metal work, shipbuilding, pigeons, rabbits, squirrels, 
silkworms, parlor games, puzzles, tricks, conjuring, charades, acros- 
tics, with plenty of things to do and make, but with this element 
subordinated to use. R. B. Routledge ^ has compiled two volumes 
of great pedagogic interest, the first dealing with the steam engine 
and its use, iron tools, railways, workshops, firearms, Suez Canal, 
sand, iron bridges, printing press, pnetimatic dispatch, hydraulic 
power, spectroscope, the eye, lighthouses, new metals, anaesthetics, 
explosive gas, and finally the greatest discovery of the age, " Joules's 
foot-pound," with occasional portraits and biographies interspersed. 
His later book " describes the grounds and environments of an ideal 
school at Overton Lodge, where the principal develops a scheme 
of teaching science by pastimes, discussing the steps of his plan with 
the vicar. The third chapter is more serious, on magnetics, simpli- 
fied theories of magnetism; then come pastimes about magic mir- 
rors, fairy fountains, the camera obscura, the magic lantern, etc. 
Then come the thaumotrope, zoetrope, spectrum, color tops, and 
color blindness and the blind, signboards, symbols, riddles, hearing 
through the teeth, whispering galleries, sea shells, speaking tubes, 
music boxes, complex vibrations, ancient music, combs, oscillations, 
force, inertia, and matter, first law of motion, impact, billiard play- 
ing, stable and unstable equilibrium, balancing, stilts, the ball run- 
ning up an incline, waterfalls and wheels, trip hammers, kinetic 
energy, the swing, Galileo at Pisa, absolute time, standard time, 
centrifugal force, tension, capillarity, vacuum, compressed air, 
popguns, bellows, pump, valve, barometer, battledore and shuttle- 
cock, rockets, and tumbling puppets. T. A. L. Du Moncel ^ describes 
various forms of musical and speaking telephones, explains the fun- 
damental principles and arrangements of the Bell type of eight- or 
ten-battery telephones, the Bell patents, with experiments, the 
microphone with its attachments, uses, stations, call bells, alarms, 
etc. The book is a model of clear and concise statement, although 
not up to date. J. H. Pepper* explains the use of much chemical 
and physical apparatus required for simple experiments concerning 
impenetrability, centrifugal force, gravity, cohesion, crystallization, 
optics, heat, etc. The illustrations are particularly well chosen, 
although the occasional appeals to humor are less successful. A 
very interesting relay to all this is found in the literature of magic, 

1 Discoveries and Inventions of the Nineteenth Century. N. Y., Routledge, 
1898. 767 p. See also G. B. Smith: How to Succeed as an Inventor. Phila., 
Inventors and Investors Corporation, 11 14 Chestnut St., 1909. 76 p. G. C. 
Marks: Inventions, Patents, and Designs. N. Y., Van Nostrand, 1909. 116 p. 
George lies: Inventors at Work. N. Y., Doubleday, 1906. 503 p. 

2 Science in Sport made Philosophy in Earnest. London, 1877. 

*The Telephone, the Microphone, and the Phonograph. London, 1879. 
272 p. 70 illustrations. 
. < The Boys' Play Book of Science. Lond., Routledge, 1881. 506 p. 
40 



6io EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

now quite voluminous. The best of these books, like those of Albert 
A. Hopkins ^ and Professor Hoffmann,- abound, like the toy books, 
in scores and hundreds of illustrations of things that easily could be 
made into a manual training department at every grade, from lowest 
to highest, and which from the beginning would illustrate scientific 
principles and give all the zest that the natural boy feels in the 
manipulations of the superior knowledge that thaumaturgy supplies. 
Oliver Lodge ^ gives a brief story of the lives and achievements of 
Copernicus, Tycho-Brahe, Keppler, Galileo, Descartes, Newton, 
Broehme, and Bradley, Lagrange, Laplace, Herschel, Bessel, with 
additional talks on the discovery of Neptune, comets and meteors, 
and tides and planetary evolution. The biographical portion of each 
section treating of different writers is brief but serves as a stimu- 
lating introduction to the processes and accounts of thtir scientific 
achievements which follow. Photography has pedagogic features, 
and among the most interesting institutions I have ever seen is that 
of the Imperial School of Photography with its magnificent building 
in Vienna, where all the processes of reproduction, lithography, 
lantern slides, and scientific demonstrations are laid own. Here 
we have popular books by D. L. Elmendorf,* A. E. Dolbear,^ Lewis 

^ Magic Stage Illusions and Scientific Diversions, including Trick Photography, 
N. Y., Munn, 1897. 556 p. 

2 Modern Magic. Lond., Routledge, 1886. 511 p. 

^ Pioneers of Science. N. Y., Macmillan, 1904. 404 p. See also G. E. John- 
son: Education by Plays and Games. Boston, Ginn, 1907. 234 p. M. R. 
Hofer: Popular Folk Games and Dances for Playground, Vacation School and 
Schoolroom Use. Chic, Flanagan, 1907. 56 p. D. C. Beard, Boy Pioneers, 
N. Y., Scribner, 1909. 329 p. Mrs. F. H. Kirk: Old English Games and Physical 
Exercises. N. Y., Longmans, 1906. 51 p. F. Wehman: Wehman Brothers' 
New Books of 150 Parlor Tricks and Games; homemade apparatus. N. Y., 
Wehman, 1905. 106 p. J. D. Champlin: Young Folks' Cyclopaedia of Games 
and Sports. N. Y., Holt, 1899. 784 p. J. H. Bancroft: Games for the Play- 
ground, Home, School, and Gymnasium. N. Y., Macmillan, 1909. 456 p. W. 
Kirsch: Scientific Magical Experiments. Newark, N. J. W. Krisch, 1910. 8 p. 
H. J. Burlingame: Hermann the Great; the famous magician's wonderful tricks. 
Chic, Laird, 1905. 298 p. B. R. Parsons: Plays and Games for Indoors and 
Out. N. Y., Barnes, 1909. 215 p. Games Book for Boys and Girls. N. Y., 
Dutton, 1906. 415 p. D. F. Canfield (and others): What Shall We Do Now? 
500 Games and Pastimes. N. Y., Stokes, 1907. 419 p. M. E. Barse: Games 
for all Occasions. Brewer, Barse & Co., 1909. 208 p. C. Wells: Pleasant Day 
Diversions. N. Y., Moffat, 1909. 282 p. W. H. J. Shaw: New Ideas in Magic 
Illusions, Spirituahstic Effects, etc. St. Louis, W. H. J. Shaw, 1902. 93 p. H- 
R. Evans : Old and New Magic. Chic, Open Court, 1909. 45° P- W. Goldston: 
Tricks and Illusions for Amateur and Professional Conjurers. N. Y., Dutton, 
1909. 250 p. 

^ Lantern Slides; How to Make and Color Them. A Practical Pocket Book of 
Photography. 1900. 

5 The Art of Projecting. Boston, Lee, 1892. 178 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 6ii 

Wright/ Ernst Vogel,' and others. There are very many manuals 
here treating of various types of apparatus, the dark room, negatives, 
gelatin and dry plates and wet, collodion, emulsions, enlarged and 
reduced negatives, recovery of the silver residues, various processes 
of printing, toning, copying, and directions how to make a very 
simple practical laboratory. The point is that the mind of active 
boys ought to be exposed to books of this kind, among which each 
would be sure to find something ravishing and mind kindling. 
Manual construction of the whole or of parts, now large, now small, 
could readily be so arranged as to give intellectual interest its due 
prominence, and to make it the mainspring for inciting to manipula- 
tion. If the books which now exist were used as they should be, 
this would incite to the writing of the many more and better than 
now exist that ought to be and would be composed. And all this 
may serve to illustrate the new type of curriculum which I urge 
ought to be constructed as a link that is missing between the school 
and shop which the present mechanical manual training courses, 
wooden in their intelligence and iron in their inflexibility, do not 
bridge. 

All this would show natural aptitudes and help vocational 
bureaus Hke that established in 1908 in Boston, or other 
agencies to test and advise youth, which should exist in every 
city. Some schools have assistants to help their graduates 
in this way. O. H. Woolley, Passaic, N. J., has representa- 
tives of the professions and industries of the city give talks 
before the high school as to their business and the opportuni- 
ties — one on its dark and one on its bright side — laying stress 
on the peculiar natural and educational qualifications neces- 
sary for success in each. Connected with some trade schools 
for girls are assistants to recommend graduates for positions 
they can fill or to investigate factories and shops to see if they 
are fit. The late Dr. Frank Parsons^ developed questionnaires 
that became for older youth rather highly elaborated, which 
each applicant had to fill out as a basis for the personal ad- 
vice of an expert. The idea was to size up each lad with 
regard to his physical, mental, and moral qualities needful 
for success. The Y. M. C. A. in various places has at- 

' Optical Projection; A Treatise on the Use of the Lantern. London, Long- 
mans, 1901. 438 p. 

2 Practical Pocket Book of Photography. Tr. and ed. by E. C. Conrad. 
Macmillan, 1902. 223 p. 

^ Choosing a Vocation. Boston, Houghton, Mifflin Co., 1909. 165 p. 



6i2 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

tempted some of this work, which is now being begun in Ger- 
many.^ That vastly more could, should, and will be done 
along these lines now seems certain. Courses for such coun- 
selors have already been proposed, and in a few instances 
given in outline. Such an adviser needs to have two very 
diverse kinds of knowledge : first, a large endowment of 
native tact and knowledge of human nature, and the special 
psychology of which this is the best foundation, along with 
certain apparatus for making tests scientific; and, second, he 
needs a wide practical knowledge of the leading branches of 
industry. No one can doubt that misfits now cause great 
M'aste and many pathetic failures on the part of men who, 
if in the industries they were best fitted for, would achieve 
success. Inherited tendencies toward diseases should bar 
those who have them from certain industries. Every quality 
is a factor in the inventories needed, such as size, good looks, 
manner, dress, habits, tastes, reading, experience, disposition, 
resources, residential and family ties, voice, accuracy of 
senses, memory, sympathy, association, ambition, readiness to 
adapt, rapidity of thought and action, power to work with 
others, regularity, cordiality, self-reliance, tolerance, foresight, 
temper, poise, democratic disposition, ability to persuade, 
trustfulness — all these and many more are assets, and upon 
self-analysis, aided by the investigations of the adviser, wast- 
age may often be avoided and occasionally great success in- 
sured. No college elective system has presented so many op- 
tions as do vocations now for people far younger than college 
students. We now treat subnormal children far better when 
we subject them to scores and sometimes hundreds of tests 
as a basis for prescribing their hygiene, pedagogics, regimen, 
instruction or calling. Here is where accumulated data from 
the study of children and adolescents might be made of the 
greatest practical service. Vast numbers of young men and 
women have consulted phrenologists and perhaps palmists, 
astrologers, spiritual mediums, etc., to get tips on how they 
should invest the most precious capital of their lives ; although 
for most of them chance, accident, local environment, and the 
example of cronies determine. An office where crude human 

* L. Mittenzwey: Der Berufswahl. Leipzig, Duor, 1910. 217 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 613 

material could be assayed is surely now a desideratum. The 
demands of many business concerns are of late more and more 
frequently scheduled with great detail, and examinations for 
fitness are often elaborate and extend far outside those quali- 
ties that education can cultivate. Sometimes ambitions and 
inclinations are developed in directions in which other traits 
would make great success impossible; while often the realiza- 
tion of this fact, if it comes betimes, will supply the most po- 
tent of all incentives for overcoming the handicap. The field 
for this applied psycho-physiology is wide, and, when the su- 
preme value of the human factor is fully realized, there can 
be no shadow of doubt that every boy and girl will be pro- 
vided with access to such an expert, a single session with 
whom has already in many instances changed the entire cur- 
rent of lives from failure to success. Vocational proclivities 
and abilities are often apparent some years before puberty, 
although at the dawn of adolescence they become very mani- 
fest. The advantages of such psycho-industrial experts would 
be great not only to the young but to those who employ them ; 
and a certificate of aptness with more or less detail will no 
doubt ere long supplement the ordinary testimonials of gen- 
eral character. The demands of employers, if collected and 
systematized here, would be a great spur to boys ambitious 
of entering specific vocations ; and these, concisely and au- 
thoritatively put together, would be a boon to our entire edu- 
cational system. 

History shows an almost invincible tendency of peda- 
gogues to reduce everything introduced into the school to 
scholastic hypermethodic form, and to disinfect it of every 
taint of utilitarianism for the sake of culture values. The 
story of the kindergarten, drawing, physical culture, nature 
study, and even science, shows this. Indeed, stenography, 
dressmaking, embroidery, bookkeeping, and all the rest have 
been challenged on the one hand for lacking, and advocated 
on the other for having culture value, just as sloyd and 
manual training have been purged of utility to become liberal 
and been made a drill in mere manual dexterity. This horror 
of remunerativeness leads M. B. Higgins to say, " Our trade 
school is generally a school attachment while it should be a 
shop with a school attachment." Many recent psychological 



6i4 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

studies throw grave doubt upon the whole gymnastic theory 
of education, so that it is at any rate now an open question 
whether the training of one activity strengthens another, or 
whether any study can give general power, ability, or formal 
discipline that helps others. Once it was thought that the 
study of logic and the categories, then classics and mathe- 
matics, gave unique power that, once acquired, could be turned 
into almost any field. This was aided by the view that the 
mind was not divided into faculties but was unitary. It is 
demonstrated that even memory training in one field gives 
little mnemonic power in others, although Angel, Pillsbury, 
and Judd ^ think the practice of one function influences an- 
other, and that activities are so interrelated that we must 
assume some identity of common elements. In point of fact, 
we psychologists must make the mortifying confession that 
we know almost nothing of pure culture values, either what 
they are or how to acquire them. But we do know that to 
succeed an individual must put his whole soul into his work, 
and that the study of even Greek, Latin, and logic in a half- 
hearted way is demoralizing and soporific. We know, too, 
that if most men do not find culture value in their own voca- 
tion they will never find it. Anything is cultural that arouses 
the ambition of young people to do their best ; hence, whether 
a topic is cultural or practical depends wholly upon the point 
of view and the spirit. Education is always only a means 
to an end ; and to teach, to heal, to preach, to plead, to pre- 
scribe, to investigate, is industrial training. To put thought 
into work is to idealize existence. Brereton defines culture 
as " the sum total of the sociological results of human en- 
deavor in mechanical, mental, and moral fields." C. B. Gibson 
shows how shop work intensifies interest in what have been 
thought to be the purely cultural fields, and Carroll D. Wright 
insisted that industrial training was the best means of culti- 
vating truthfulness, integrity, and social solidarity, for a man 
without a vocation is not a real member of the community. 
We know that industry is an immense stimulus to the fee- 
ble-minded, and there is a great convergence of testimony 



'A. Meiklejohn: Is Mental Training a Myth? Educational Review, 1909. 
Vol. 37, pp. 1 26-141. See especially p. 130. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 615 

that industrial schools show a high grade of intellectual work 
and stimulate it. Professor P. H. Hanus deplores the timid- 
ity and often disparagement of vocational things by educators, 
who, he says, have sometimes " even measured their own 
usefulness by the extent to which they keep the distinctly use- 
ful out of their work," and where they have undertaken to 
defend even sewing and cooking have done so because of 
their psychological worth instead of for their great practical- 
ity. Thus, he adds in substance, the school fails to reach most 
of our youth during the most critical period of adolescence, 
so. that they do not have " all the conveniences for thinking." 
Where the vocational ideal has become effective, teachers seek 
to make practical topics into " a moral setting-up drill for the 
intellect." Briggs shows that pupils are prone to regard the 
school as a place of " delightful irresponsibility where a youth 
may disport himself before he is condemned to hard labor." 
Thus if the school can in any sense be called a miniature 
world, which it cannot, it is an unreal one. A New York 
teacher writes that she really ceased teaching years ago, and 
has since been rr.n-ing a machine, and since she has some- 
times felt " that school-teaching may be characterized as Gen- 
eral Sherman described war." It, too, is paved with good 
intentions, as well as with fair syllabi. Another says that 
teachers know the wheel of Ixion, the banquet of Tantalus, 
Sisyphus's stone, and how Cataline abuses our patience, that 
they feel the vanity and limbo nature of what they teach. 
Flexner finds that college students lack " spontaneity and dis- 
interested intellectual activity," and says they emerge " flighty, 
superficial, and immature," and that " the very qualities that 
seem to secure the degree B.A. would secure a man's dismissal 
from any other business whatever." Woodrow Wilson de- 
clares that he has come to feel that he was bending all his ener- 
gies to do a thing that could not be done, as if he were work- 
ing in a vacuum with no transmitting medium. And Barrett 
Wendell (The Privileged Classes of America) says: "Many 
bachelors of arts ... are virtually undereducated." " The 
younger generation seem hardly educated at all." " Tradi- 
tional methods of education have been tried and found want- 
ing." For most men work is a struggle for the market, and 
pupils need to be kept in vital touch with some kind of a mar- 



6i6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ket idea in order to feel that they are doing something worth 
while. To be cultivated we must be industrious. No one 
can work well for culture alone, but for some end or product. 
It was only when Latin ceased to have any value in the mar- 
ket that it set up as cultural, and here began its decadence. 
Our present system was meant for an earlier, simpler stage 
of progress. Its remoteness from practicality is vitally con- 
nected with such criticisms as those of Edward Everett Hale, 
who says : " Our school system fails in instilling morality " ; 
of President C. W. Eliot, who thinks the intelligence it gen- 
erates is not effective and is hardly worth its cost ; of Admiral 
Evans, who pronounced its product contemptible; of Edison, 
who complained that it utterly ignored applied science; of 
Rabbi Hirsch, that it is an almost bankrupt institution; of 
Frederick Harrison, that it is very successful in turning out 
uniform stupid types devoid of originality. C. H. Johnston ^ 
thinks that perhaps we should compel all employers of boys 
up to seventeen to allow them to continue their education at 
some favorable art of the day, and that we must radically re- 
construct our educational machinery and curriculum. At pres- 
ent there are scores of supplementary institutions to do what 
the school fails to do. It has to be amplified here, mended 
there, patched in one place, pinched in another. Type after 
type of child is more or less segregated as needing special 
attention. To a recent writer who declared that culture 
and hard work were incompatible and that the gentleman's 
graduating mark is C, this being the lowest passing mark, 
we would insist that good laundry work is better than bad 
Latin.=^ 

Our system is undemocratic. It is absurd to speak of the 
dignity of labor and yet not consider its elements worthy the 
dignity of being taught in our schools. " It is a fair ques- 
tion," says one writer, " to ask now what good it does the 
average boy to go to school after the fifth or sixth grade." 
Those who do so are at best only being trained for positions 
of a clerical nature, while constructive interests are suppressed. 

1 The Social Significance of Various Movements for Industrial Education. 
Educational Review, 1909. Vol. 37, pp. 160-180. 

2 See J. G. Croswell: The One Thing Needful. Educational Review, 1909. 
Vol. 37, pp. 142-159- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 617 

We train all alike, and take small account of individual dif- 
ferences, although it is on these that success largely depends. 
Each should become conscious of personal powers, but we de- 
velop ignorance of these and allow them to slumber, as con- 
trasted with Huxley's idea of a school as a capacity-catching 
and -developing machine. While the higher technical schools 
here compare not unfavorably with those in Europe, we focus 
on the top rungs of the ladder and let those on the bottom 
take care of themselves. Hence, as Commissioner Draper, of 
New York, says, " Germany is educationally more democratic 
than the United States." We take no cognizance of the pu- 
pil's destiny, make no distinction between capacities and pro- 
clivities. Those M^ho leave are usually those not ecjuipped for 
the unique work of the higher grades, which will always ap- 
peal to but a few, or else they are those with vocational pro- 
clivities who become dissatisfied with the school. The boy 
who goes on till fourteen or after has learned much which he 
cannot apply, and which is, therefore, forgotten as soon as 
he leaves, so that by eighteen or nineteen he is more igno- 
rant than when he left school; thus the investment which the 
state made in his education is wasted. At this latter age the 
boy should feel tolerably sure not only of a livelihood, but of 
advancement. Our high school to-day is chiefly for those 
who have no idea what is ahead of them or else for a very 
few who are fitting for some higher institution. They are 
taught a few general principles of drawing, mathematics, 
physics, chemistry, etc. ; but the physics and chemistry of 
nothing in particular, oblivious of the fact that each of these 
studies is vaster than a lifetime can master, and that to apply 
a portion of it or to use it in some field is the only goal that 
will ever make a knowledge of tliem more than useless lum- 
ber in their minds. In the simpler, earlier, rural conditions, 
the school touched life ; but under the present complex, urban, 
industrial status, the school has grown more and more isolated. 
Perhaps our schools are gaining efficiency along their own 
peculiar lines, as the late Springfield tests on old examination 
papers of a hundred years ago in geography, arithmetic, and 
spelling — a test repeated at Boston and elsewhere with the 
same result — seem to show. But an inactive life can never 
appeal to the active boy in the early teens, but may develop 



6i8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

habits of idleness, lack of definite purpose and disposition to 
look forward ; and so the harvest at eighteen is unsatisfactory. 
The book-world pupils learn in school is remote, far more so 
than it need be, from that which they find themselves in. Had 
they even studied the political, industrial, and social problems 
of ancient Greece and Rome and modern Europe, instead of 
the grammar and languages of these countries, they would 
have been better able to interpret present history and grasp 
our and their own problems. Again, teachers usually imme- 
diately lose sight of all their pupils who drop out from twelve 
to sixteen, when it is those children who especially need guid- 
ance as they near the end of their schooling and especially 
just as they leave it. Hence, more attention should be given 
to all as the age of compulsory attendance draws toward a 
close. Even the learned professions are only trades that split 
off earlier in history ; and we must now carry the idea of pro- 
fessional training down into the public schools, so that here 
belongs the vocational bureau. Great teachers have often 
kept hold of and guided their pupils after they left, especially 
those who dropped out prematurely. No boy should leave 
without some idea of the industrial conditions of his own 
environment and some conception of what he is, and perhaps, 
still more important, what he is not fitted for. Hence, as 
E. C. Morse well says, geography, English, history should 
so far as possible have a local focus and be connected with raw 
material, markets, etc., of local industries. Boys of twelve 
should know something of the establishments, history, and 
processes of the larger concerns of their own environment. 
In every textile center, e. g., there should be a textile museum 
in the school, stories written on subjects connected with it, 
and Morse suggests that such written material might in time 
accumulate so that it could be developed into a hook to be 
used in the public schools of the town, such as I shall else- 
where indicate for each trade. Manufacturers should co- 
operate by a loan of files of their journals ; the public library 
should fall into line ; teachers should be given leave of ab- 
sence from their duties occasionally to prepare pamphlets on 
the industries of the town. In a school in Cork, each room 
was surrounded by cases containing every stage of manufac- 
ture from the raw material to the finished product; and yet 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 619 

this was not a trade school. Why should we educate away 
from trades, farms, etc. ? Were our grandmothers the worse 
for weaving, spinning, making candles, soap, etc. ? We might 
make it a rule that every industrial course should fit for some- 
thing higher as well as for life; but if we did so, this should 
be only incidental. At present employers, says J. P. Haney, 
have no suggestion as to the vocational training of boys be- 
fore sixteen; while teachers are often thinking of an earlier 
age. Boys are rarely wanted in shops before sixteen. He, 
too, insists that by the sixth school year the elementary capac- 
ities of pupils may be pretty well detected. Those with pro- 
clivities should have their needs met ; and this should be made 
the core of their teaching and not incidental. This kind of 
training should begin near the sixth grade, where the defec- 
tion is most marked. Various schools might be so organized 
as to lead to a particular group of industries; but we must 
always, where possible, secure the advantage of shop disci- 
pline; and thus with short, long, evening, partial, continuation, 
apprentice, technical, and every other kind of school, we may 
at last hope to do our duty to the rising generation and to the 
prosperity of the nation. 

Mr. A. D. Dean, of New York, is averse to any scheme 
that does not stress the local industrial enviromnent. His plan 
is that, if there are 25 boys who wish to learn the plumber's 
trade at the age of 14, or 25 girls who wish to learn dress- 
making, instruction must be provided; and the same for any 
other group. This would give our educational system flexi- 
bility. Schools should certainly be open day and evening. 
Mary A. Van Kleek insists that every single trade must be 
long and carefully investigated by commissioners or paid ex- 
perts before conclusions regarding industrial education in that 
trade can be reached. She reports that 3 investigators have 
studied 2 trades on Manhattan Island for more than a year, 
but that their practical results are not yet ready for publica- 
tion. It cannot be planned apart from constantly changing 
conditions in each locality. Information usually gathered is 
far too general to be of use. We must not confuse indus- 
trial and vocational education. The only really valuable 
material is information concerning conditions in each trade 
in the community where the trade training is to be introduced. 



620 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

The visits by pupils to shops and factories should be habitual; 
the practical should always, as it naturally does, precede the 
theoretical. The industrial schools ought to exist at least ii 
months in the year, and the shop equipment should be the 
latest and best under a skilled mechanic. Public money must 
not be focused upon one, to the neglect of other, local 
industries. Here we have quite a history of failures. Pub- 
lic sentiment is too shifting to maintain a higher standard. 
In one American city, the entire prosperity of which depends 
upon the skill and intelligence of workmen, a fine school was 
slowly built up that was of great aid to the chief industry of 
the town ; but finally rival industries combined and a reaction- 
ary board came in, so that all the progress of years was lost. 
Now although most of these censures are directed against 
• the school system generally and show the now rapidly rising 
tide of public discontent with former and present matter and 
methods, many of them apply to manual training with almost 
unabated force. The stock manual training courses we not 
infrequently find taught to pubescent boys ^3; women — a more 
absurd pedagogic monstrosity can hardly be conceived. If 
even the upper grammar grades are becoming more and more 
girls' classes in general, the effeminate type of manual training 
takes away the virile element just at that critical age when 
boys desert school most rapidly, should be turned over to their 
fathers at home, and need male teachers most. Now the 
courses that I have plead for above are preeminently boys' 
courses and need men to teach them, and would tend to bring 
the lost rnale factor back into the school. They would allow 
some of the natural sex bifurcation so imperatively needed 
when the dawn of the teens comes. The boast often made 
that girls do as well as boys in manual courses is sufficient 
to condemn these courses, as all the many studies of compara- 
tive hand power of the sexes, that is so rapidly diminishing 
at this age, conclusively show. Industrial training for boys 
at this stage of life can thus never be well taught by women; 
nor can girls ever equal boys in it. All sensible women, un- 
scarred by the war of sex against sex, admit this. Hence, 
even if it costs more, we must have men. To those nations 
with the true instinct of parenthood nothing is too good or 
too costly for the real needs of children. In view of all the 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 621 

above facts, must we not admit, if we are candid, that we have 
bhndly and shamefully neglected the needs of our boys, that, 
so far as they are concerned, our school system almost ought 
to be declared bankrupt and start afresh. If the remedies here 
suggested are not the true and best cure for this grave dis- 
ease, it behooves us to give ourselves no rest till we have found 
a better one. 

The combination of Ht reading zmth hand work, advo- 
cated above for toys and elementary scientific apparatus, 
might also be applied in modulating over to more vocational 
training, although the book side, whence should come the 
intellectual appeal, is as yet slightly developed. Glasszvork, 
e. g., dates from ancient Egypt, and its history is fascinating. 
Till about a century ago glass blowing was often a profession 
for gentlemen. Its educational value for the hand, in training 
it to work under the guidance of the eye and brain, has al- 
ways been rated high. Thomas Bolas ^ brings out much of 
its charm. His work implies a little knowledge of physics 
and chemistry. The apparatus needful would take little more 
room than a sewing machine, and he thinks should be not 
only in every school but in every house where there are young 
people. He compares its training value to piano playing. 
The story of the origin of the different kinds of glass and 
their manipulation from antiquity down is of the greatest in- 
terest and culture value. He combines the story and use of 
blowpipes, bellows, methods of effecting rapid change from 
large to small jets, lamps, stopcocks, glass knives, files, how 
to lead a crack, calipers, grinders, cleaners, rods and tubes, 
gauging, cleaning, rifting, abrasion, sealing bulbs, perforating, 
bending, joining and branching, gradations, etching, annealing, 
connecting tubes with metal fittings, how to make thermome- 
ters, vacuum pipes, barometers, phosphorescent tubes, glass 
pens, lenses, and even how to color and stain. His work is 
admirably illustrated, and there is an interesting color plate 
of articles made with a simple blowpipe, with a bibliography 
on glass work. W. A. Shenstone's book - is briefer and in a 

> Glass Blowing and Working for Amateurs, Experimentalists, and Technicians. 
N. Y., Truslove, 1898. 212 p. 

2 Methods of Glass Blowing for the Use of Physical and Chemical Students. 
Lond., Rivington, 1889. 86 p. See also W. Rosenhain: Glass Manufacture. 



622 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

sense more advanced, describing how to cut, bend, make funnels, 
graduate and calibrate. A bright boy, he says, can be taught 
on the first day how to make a thermometer, and it would not 
take long to show him a little of the methods of lens grinding, 
annealing, working in fluoric colors, making stoppers, chok- 
ing in and contracting bores, making U and spiral tubes and 
very simple chemical apparatus. This work has been success- 
fully taught to boys at South Kensington. These books show 
at least what could be done in the way of further adaptation 
and adjustment to every grade and even to very young boys. 
Again, plumbing gives us another combination of brain 
and hand work which F. W. Tower ^ has described in an in- 
teresting and suggestive way. Water next to air is the prime 
support of life. By its power to transmit pressure it becomes 
in a sense a machine, natural supply being dependent upon 
gravity. A treatment of wells opens an interesting chapter 
in biology. Pumps, hydraulic rams and water meters do the 
same in physics, filters for chemistry, boilers for hydrody- 
namics and to introduce steam power generally; while tanks, 
metals, solder, joining, waste, drainage, subsoil, ventilation, 
traps, siphonage friction, air locks, water hammers, electroly- 
sis, sinks, baths, lavatories, sewage — are all treated in a way 
that links science and health and hand power, and shows the 
real dignity of this profession. This work is a text with 
question and answer covering interesting points. H. Rowell ^ 
treats in a condensed way of the utilization of chemicals, in- 
cluding blowpipe, lamp, alloys, spelters, oxidization, fluxes, 
structure of flame, heat transmission, radiation, forge, hearth, 
tongs, property of metals and their fusibility with alloys, vari- 
ous polishes, colors, hardening, sweating, etc. 



N. Y., Van Nostrand, 1908. 264 p. A. L. Duthrie: Decorative Glass Processes. 
N. Y., Van Nostrand, 1909. 278 p. P. N. Hasluck: Glass Writing, Embossing 
and Fascia Work. Phila., McKay, 1906. 160 p. 

' Plumbers' Manual and Text-book; Dictionary of Plumbing Terms. Spring- 
field, Lyman, 1901. 242 p. 

2 Manual of Instruction in Hard Soldering. N. Y., Baird, 1901. 56 p. See 
also J. J. Cosgrove: Principles and Practice of Plumbing. Standard Sanitary 
Mfg., 1907. 278 p. P. J. Davies: Standard Practical Plumbing. N. Y., Spon, 
1907. 3 V. F. W. Raynes: Domestic Sanitary Engineering and Plumbing. 
N. Y., Longmans, 1909. 474 p. C. B. Ball and H. T. Sherriff: Plumbing Cate- 
chism. Chic, Domestic Engineering, 1908. 123 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 623 

In a still different way we might and should combine in- 
tellectual interests with the mere deftness now cultivated in 
raffia work and splint interlacing. Every teacher in this de- 
partment should saturate his mind with such literature as that 
which has one of its most exquisite illustrations in the pri- 
vately printed volume of G. W. James/ who considers bas- 
ketry the mother of poetry, and shows its relations to Indian 
legends and ceremonials, describes the tribes, colors, materials, 
weaves, stitches, designs, uses, conventionalization, and the 
marvelous way in which the symbolism of animals, plants, the 
sky, sea, which is often sacredly secret, is wrought out. 

This art is now in a state of decay owing to " the iconoclastic 
efifects of our civilization upon a simple-hearted people." " In the 
noonday of this art the basket was the woman's battlefield. In 
it she won her triumphs and suffered her defeats." To be the 
best weaver was the height of her am.bition and to succeed gave 
great influence. It was an accompHshment Hke piano playing and 
brought suitors. There were a few true artists. " It would be a 
calamity to Indians and Whites alike were this art allowed to die." 
" In its salvation a greater good can be done the Indian than by a 
century's distribution of supplies." Those who educate the Indians 
should have mothers teach their daughters and teach them in every 
Reservation school. These weavers should be well paid for teaching 
all that is in them. Whites should sit at their feet and a renaissance 
here would bring increased respect for the Indian as well as financial 
return. Symbolism plays an immense role here. Some makers have 
their own designs and conventionalities, the meaning of which it is 
often hard to learn because of reserve, fear of ridicule, etc. Many de- 
signs are still as unread as was the Rosetta Stone ; and many a home- 
staying woman has put her life into patterns, as white artists do into 
books and pictures. The weaver may put her whole soul or secret 
history into her work, gathering suggestions from everything about 
her. One large and marvelously artistic basket with concentric 
rings diminishing at the bottom to a dot was explained. " With 
touching pathos the maker said she intended that the lessening 
circles should determine the lessening power and numbers of her 
people." She said when her peopfe first arrived, they were under 
the direct smile and approval of thosd above, were great as the 
larger circle ; then came the padres and took away one privilege after 
another until they were reduced to this (pointing to a smaller circle 
farther down) ; then came the Mexicans who brought further cur- 
tailment; then the Americans, and the circles representing her 
people grew smaller and smaller until soon only the dot and then 



'Indian Basketry. N. Y., Malkan, 1901. 274 p. 



624 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

nothing would remain. Another basket showed flying bats supposed 
to suck the breath, to hold propitiatory offerings to the higher 
powers, to keep away these and all evils ; this basket took almost a 
lifetime to weave. Another made by a widow, whose husband was 
shot by Jim Farrar, is told in H. H.'s " Ramona." She could not 
sleep from grief and gazed into the night sky thinking of what the 
padre said that there she would meet her husband. So she hoped 
long and loved the stars and in token of this and her grief made her 
star basket. But she waited long and could not go to the skies, and 
so found the basket a liar. It said go, and she went not, and so she 
sold it. Although greatly excited when it was brought back to her, 
she would not take it again, for she had abandoned hope and the 
promises of religion. In another basket, circles stand for the vil- 
lages of the Sabobas, with a link to connect them ; above were moun- 
tains with the sun peeping over them into the valleys ; there was an 
evening and morning star to assure the makers that those above had 
not deserted them. Another with many stitches and crosses was 
thus explained by the weaver: she was often tired and angered at 
the domineering Whites and, as she lay down, gazed at the stars and 
the Milky Way and longed to die that her spirit might walk this 
path of light and look down upon the Whites in the trouble she 
hoped would punish them. Often, too, on their sashes and buckskin 
shirts are emblazoned their signs of the heavenly bodies — rainbow, 
fire, hail, butterfly, snake, beetle, and other powers to which they 
appeal for aid in hours of distress. 

All these and many more lead up to another conclusion 
which years of study of the problem of industrial education 
has confirmed in my own mind — and that is the urgent neces- 
sity now of hooks on the leading trades addressed to the 
young. The leather industry, particularly boot and shoe 
manufacture, is perhaps the most highly specialized of all in 
the sense that an operator may work a lifetime in any one of 
the between three and four score processes through which a, 
shoe passes and know little of all the rest. Now the Shoe 
Book should describe hides and leathers, tanning — old and 
new methods, with a little of the natural history of the ani- 
mals, describe the process of taking them, of curing and ship- 
ping, each stage in the factory, designating those processes 
that require skill and those that do not, and so on to packing, 
labeling and shipping, with descriptions showing the prin- 
ciples of the chief machines and labor-saving devices, at any 
rate so far as they are not trade secrets ; it should include a 
glance at markets, prices, effects of business advance, depres- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 625 

sion and strikes, perhaps something about the hygiene of the 
foot, about bootblacks and what is done for them, history of 
the festivals and organizations from St. Crispin and the gilds 
down, tariffs, syndicates, societies, statistics, social conditions 
in shoe towns, nationality of operatives — all these could be 
concisely set forth to show the dimensions, the centers of in- 
terest, the social and commercial relations of the business, 
etc. What is not yet realized is that all these things could and 
should be put down in print and picture, almost as if it were 
to be issued as a text-book or a series of them ; all this could 
be done to bring out the very high degree of culture value 
now latent in the subject. Just this is what pedagogues do 
not and will not see and what even shoe men fail to realize ; 
viz., that the story of their craft, rightly told, would tend 
to give it some degree of professional and humanistic interest 
and dignity which the most unskilled and transient employee 
would feel. It would foster an esprit de corps, pride in 
membership and, above all, an intelligent view of the whole 
field that would make labor more valuable and more loyal. 
This material, once gathered, should be used in some form in 
all industrial schools and courses in towns where this indus- 
try dominates. It would bring a wholesome sense of cor- 
poreity, historic and economic unity, would give a touch of 
the old gild spirit, and more power to see both sides on the 
part of both employers and workmen. Nothing is so truly 
educational in the deepest psychological sense of that word 
as useful information vitalized by individual and vocational 
interest; and at the present psychological moment, nothing 
would be more helpful than a book each on some score or 
more other great industries. It cannot be too strongly affirmed 
or too often reiterated that industrial leaders and corpora- 
tions should take up without delay and with such aid as expert 
economists and others could give, not entirely ignoring the 
view point of the social welfare worker, the task of distilling, 
putting up and labeling the wisdom of each craft edited 
broadly and up to date with copious concrete instances as a 
vade niecum to their trade. Training in manipulation under 
the most skilled artisans is not enough. The intellect must he 
strongly appealed to. The knowledge of all should be culled 
and curriculized. The business itself should be an object of 
41 



626 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

study — its social influences, its relations to human well-being: 
longevity, health, fecundity, so that a vocational bureau could 
use it in advising individual youth as to their calling. Not 
until something like this is done can we ever hope to lay any 
solid foundations for industrial education. This, then, is the 
problem that pedagogy to-day puts up to industrialists: e. g., 
to manufacturers who are generally very ready to suggest, 
urge, and profit by such modifications of the curriculum as 
will relieve them of any necessity of training their apprentices, 
and will prepare and perhaps incline young people of the com- 
munity to render them more effective service. By coopera- 
ting thus they can save themselves from the charge of seek- 
ing to advance their private interests at the expense of our 
educational system. Thus they should be invoked to open 
up with as little reservation as possible everything that can 
have educative value. Labor and capital should both be 
heard from with impartial scientific frankness. The less sup- 
pression, the greater the ultimate advantage and, even if tem- 
porary difficulties resulted, there would be good in the end 
because a spirit of increased cooperation and a larger field of 
common interests would be certain; and trade spirit, trade 
pride, similar in psychic quality to that of the so-calltd learned 
professions, would be gained and, most valuable of all, new 
psychological forces so intangible yet so potent would be set 
free and enlisted in the advancement of unity and solidarity.^ 
The same holds true with, of course, infinite variations of 
detail in the domain of every great and, to some extent, of 
the small industries. This is a crying need for metal workers, 
paper makers, wool and cotton textile laborers, coal and other 

' Moving pictures are beginning to show their value in industrial education. 
By judicious selection and composition of films, scenes, the scientific processes in 
iron and steel work, the story of the railroad rail, steel plate, boiler making, casting, 
forging, also plate brass and bottle making, the construction of church bells, wire 
rope, cordage manufacture, mining of various kinds, gold washing, the making 
of money — both coinage and bills — as well as shoes, hats, clothes, machinery, 
farming processes, shipbuilding and loading, transportation of produce and live 
stock, bridge making, submarine work and tunneling, whaling, all kinds of sports, 
and even battles. Film photography can slow down rapid processes by stretching 
time and can accelerate slow ones; and can even reverse events. With suitable 
explanation, this most marvelous pedagogic instrument with more promise and 
potency in it for education than any discovery since Gutenberg can be made of 
indefinitely potent efficiency here. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 627 

miners, dyers, dressmakers, milliners, typothetes, stone cut- 
ters, masons, etc. It is also needed in the food trades; for 
instance, the problems of fisheries and fish markets and hatch- 
eries should be set forth in compendiums, wise and up-to-date 
form. The same is true of milk and the dairy. I have been 
amazed to see from one of our social surveys how instructive 
and edifying is the compilation of facts pertaining to the tgg 
and poultry business of a single city. The same is true of 
meat, cereals, bread, bakeries, drinks and all the staples of the 
table. Each needs book presentation according to a carefully 
prepared scheme which would, of course, have to be all the 
time departed from. Geography, history, arithmetic, and even 
English could be developed incidentally. To throw a topic 
from the focus to the indirect field of mental vision with the 
young is often itself a wondrous gain. There is plenty of 
opportunity for recording triumphs of enterprise, epochs that 
are fateful for the future, for bringing out economic prin- 
ciples in a most striking way, for showing political relations, 
etc. All this we simply must have before any industrial cur- 
riculum that is adequate and effective can be complete; and 
the same is no less true in educating for financial and com- 
mercial occupations. 

This vast domain of producing, making, and distributing 
what we have come to call " goods " (as if these products 
had a monopoly of this term) absorbs most of the ability 
and of the effort of the adult world to-day. Here the strug- 
gle for survival is most intense. What we call business is 
a great booming world, the laws of which we are only begin- 
ning to understand and where science will always have to be 
far behind actual life and experience. Business has long since 
subordinated the legal, to say nothing of the clerical and medi- 
cal and technological professions which it supports. Its en- 
terprise rules the world. It is setting new fashions in art, as 
well as in industry, and demanding new standards of effi- 
ciency in school, college, and university, urging trust methods 
of bookkeeping upon the higher institutions of learning, rec- 
ommending its modes of measuring capability and dealing 
with those who grow ineffective; it has its own very volu- 
minous, scattered, special, technical literature, but there is no 
adequate introduction, no bridge over which interested and 



628 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ambitious youth can enter during the years of study when 
books, whatever the practical man may think of them later, 
get in their chief work during the reading age, which is the 
teens. The American boy and youth in general, almost in 
exact proportion as he is vigorous and ambitious, feels these 
throbbing interests calling him. He also feels that he is re- 
moved and isolated from them in the schoolroom, becomes 
restless and leaves, because he wishes to find some point of 
entrance into the world where adult men live out their lives. 
Perhaps he takes a job on the outskirts of the industrial world, 
soon masters its petty details and the modicum of knowledge 
it requires, and then, feeling that he is neither learning nor 
advancing, drops off and tries another approach. Despite 
much recent progress, the school method and spirit is still too 
often about what it would be if its main purpose had been to 
shelter and protect young people from industrial and com- 
mercial interests, insights, skills, and keep them immune from 
this contagion. 

If I were charged with the development of, e. g., a textile 
school in a city of looms and spindles, I should want at least 
a year of preliminary work. I would study and try to practice 
every process of every type of labor; I would ask the leaders 
to tell me all they could suggest or I could ask about ; I would 
sketch the history of each great plant in town and the story 
of the development of the industry itself, take photographs, 
get statistics, interview all the wiser workmen, find out every 
possible point of contact of the industry with practical science, 
also with legislation, its relations to other occupations, its 
hygienic conditions, power and its distribution, periods of 
prosperity and depression, labor troubles, etc. ; I would insist 
upon the frankest and heartiest cooperation on the part of all 
concerned and require carte blanche to use everything of 
pedagogic value in the largest sense of that term; and then, 
with the aid of such material, I would strive to grade and 
curriculize what seemed most needful to develop the maxi- 
mum of culture and skill which always should be combined, 
utilizing every comparative ray of light, from the experiences 
of other cities and lands. 

Thus, in fine, if the school is to help business, the latter 
must contribute to it. With all our school-mastering and 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 629 

school-mistressing-, with all the lesson-setting and lesson-hear- 
ing and our thousands of text-books and courses, the higher 
pedagogy in many fields and respects is dead among us. 
These are educational Dark Ages. We have so lost touch 
with our children in home and school that we do not realize 
what vital contact with them means. We have no idea of our 
own decadence, no respect for our own craft as instructors, 
and do not know what teaching is, means or can do. so that 
we need a great, widespread, pedagogical revival and renais- 
sance in industrial as in moral training, for we are hardly 
awake here, but in a sleep perturbed happily now by dis- 
quieting dreams. We fear and falter when we should rise 
to the higher pedagogic statesmanship which the history of 
the few great creative periods in education should teach us. 
Hitherto we have studied this history for its practical details. 
Now we should focus upon its greatest reconstructive periods 
and profit by their lesson. We need to make a very com- 
prehensive survey and lay out new pathways from the fron- 
tier of adult endeavor down to childhood. 



How did the church come to its power? It built schools hard by 
the cathedrals and cloisters, wrought out a body of doctrine (which 
means teaching), with elaborate modes of inculcation for novices, 
adepts, acolytes ; it drilled, taught, initiated step by step, and pene- 
trated every department of life, devised liturgies, rituals, cere- 
monials, festivals, pageants, dramas, grafted upon every pagan 
belief, rite, custom, and myth, always giving each some more spir- 
itual meaning; it revised and renamed the old pagan ways and 
modes of worship, graded, adopted, and adapted, instilled, drilled, 
and thus led the young people and the always childish masses over 
into acceptance and discipleship. For the supernaturally minded, 
there were edifying miracles; for the insightful, profound mysteries; 
for the intellectualists, a theology that expressed and exercised the 
highest powers of reason. The more we know of the history of the 
mediaeval church, the more clearly we see that it won its way into 
the minds and hearts of men, not by the force of a few sudden, 
wholesale transformations which have attracted the most attention 
because they seem most striking and have been best recorded, but by 
generations of cooperative, devoted and laborious pedagogical en- 
gineering. Doctors were all teachers, as the name implies. Under 
their influence the trivium and the qnadrwiimi were slowly evolved; 
and these were the most belabored, as well as the most lasting of all 
curricula in history, admirably adapted to educate all from the lowest 
to the highest grades of service. This great course was a more or 



630 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

less genetically ordered epitome of the knowledge of the age ad- 
justed to each stage of proficiency. 

Again, take the pedagogy of Latin and Greek as slowly evolved 
by the work of grammarians through many centuries of classical 
literature, which laid under tribute the philological elements that 
were found in the parts of speech, most of which originated with 
Aristotle. These were ordered, paradigms were selected, rules 
formulated with copious illustrations and exceptions ; lexicons ever 
more complete were compiled ; and thus another great educational 
highway was opened well furnished with handbooks ; and so well 
was this work done and so perfectly systematized that it has domi- 
nated even the teaching of modern languages, and to many has 
become an end in itself instead of a means. Now this apparatus 
was designed for severe discipline and memoriter methods of teach- 
ing and learning, and it made possible the early and relatively easy 
mastery of the dead tongues, so that they were kept alive long after 
the races that spoke them had declined or died. The method ac- 
quired such momentum that it still dominates in many class rooms, 
and its pedagogical traditions are so strong that although the spirit 
of the ages changed and the goals to be attained — namely, the 
knowledge of literature or the power to speak and write the tongue — 
have fallen, the method and spirit still blindly persist where all sense, 
feeling, and knowledge of the real spirit of Greece and Rome are 
absent, and even in Protestant lands where the ecclesiastical uses of 
Latin are unknown. The same lesson is taught in the history of the 
pedagogy of number: the four species, the rules, tables, procedures, 
often the very problems themselves, are products of a long consensus 
of effort which sought to make plain the way of the learner and 
which also still survive because, like some of the old Roman roads, 
they are better to-day than the cheaper modern ones. It is also 
better set with milestones marking the various steps toward pro- 
ficiency. 

Thus the great churchmen, classicists, and mathematicians 
taught and wrought for the young, and found dehght in guid- 
ing and inspiring and in interesting them in what they were 
interested in. Perhaps ceHbacy, which deprives men of off- 
spring, gave psychological motivation to what must have been 
a genuine passion for spiritual fatherhood in aiding the un- 
foldment of youthful minds. These systems were incessantly 
belabored by the most advanced adults. On the other hand, 
never was there an educational system so widely divorced 
from the chief interests of adult life all the way from gram- 
mar school to college as ours to-day, never one so pervaded 
by influences that alienate interest in labor, skilled or un- 
skilled. Academic youth graduate with the ideal of finding 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 631 

a ready-made place rather than of making a position by earn- 
ing a HveHhood which represents real service based upon 
genuine effort. Exemption from every earning activity dur- 
ing the plastic and active years of youth is itself a danger, 
and immunity from business knowledge is often sought by 
students until the inevitable hour comes. A long experience 
in spending money does not prepare to earn it. The few fa- 
vored and exceptional youth who, after taking their first de- 
gree, for the first time don overalls and begin at the bottom 
of the ladder in a chosen business, show a commendable spirit ; 
but they do this wastefully late, and should have begun to 
work earlier, and combined labor and study from the first. 
Latin may possibly help the general intelligence of a master 
mechanic; but if it does so, it is only in an infinitesimal de- 
gree, and the same time and effort put into the theory and 
practice of his vocation would have yielded vastly more culture 
power as well as made him more serviceable, because there 
would be nothing left to atrophy. Erudition and effort in 
lines later to be abandoned do not leave the faculties as a 
whole stronger but weaker. Primary ignorance in a subject is 
interesting; it often gives strong curiosity while secondary 
ignorance is both devolution and disenchantment. 

In view of all this, it is now most pathetic to see the in- 
numerable schedules, hour plans, courses, improvised so read- 
ily and launched so complacently, as solutions of the pressing 
problem of industrial and business education. The superin- 
tendent in a one-industry town, for instance, whacks together 
a melange of stock school studies, a little manual training and 
it may be shop work, and feels that his local problem is solved. 
True, many of these courses are approximations toward the 
goal, but very slightly and slowly. Moreover, they nearly 
always omit the one cardinal thing which is the combined 
humanistic and pragmatic culture-core that is or should be 
always found at the heart of every industry in its relations 
to others, to society, and to human well-being, that only a 
systematic and exhaustive survey can ever hope to bring out. 
Every industry has a purely humanistic element in it, or it 
could not win the lifelong devotion of those engaged in it. 
And whoever succeeded who did not love his work? If this 
element is even relatively lacking in any industrial line, it 



632 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

should be found and restored, for it is one of the most 
precious of all assets even from a mercenary point of view. 
These teachable factors here postulated would, of course, be 
those of honest, honorable business and not those of deceit 
and fraud ; and this would tend to preform the youthful mind 
to industrial integrity. 

Employers complain of the lack of skilled labor, and some 
say they could double their output if they had it and could 
-get trained foremen; but the vast majority of them are utterly 
unskilled themselves in handling their human material, and 
many of them are densely ignorant of even the existence of 
the vast problems now challenging them here. The economic 
loss which results in the form of friction, lack of interest, 
carelessness, needless waste of money, breakage, and wear of 
tools and machinery, is comparable to that of great national 
resources like our forests. As long as workmen are regarded 
as parts of the machinery, to be dumped on the scrap-heap as 
soon as younger, stronger hands can be found, the very point 
of view needful for the correct solution of vocational educa- 
tion is wanting. If corporations are soulless and impersonal, 
and stockholders with no contact with plants are intent only 
upon maximal dividends, as long as short-sighted policies 
demand only quick returns and large present profits upon in- 
vestments, little permanent progress is possible. If capitalists 
lack humanity, they should at least be shown how for their 
own interests the greatest care should be exercised in main- 
taining the loyalty of their workmen, which ideally should 
be no less than that of collegians to their Alma Mater. Their 
comfort, contentment, peace of mind, are precious assets with 
high commercial value, which it would pay to cultivate, even 
at great pecuniary outlay. The time will inevitably come 
when, as experts are employed to look over every stage and 
to see how every process can be simplified and cheapened, 
every waste and by-product and even refuse profitably worked 
over, so expert social psychologists will be employed to elim- 
inate worry at home, bad food and cooking, and to find out 
raw and sore friction points that need lubrication, so that the 
human machine will work with the least loss of energy; they 
should anticipate danger and remove trouble before it reaches 
the fulminating stage; such an expert should also be always 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 633 

on the lookout for every possibility of the expression of in- 
dividuality, and make not only those capable of originality, 
but all feel that their work is worth while and not merely a 
commodity reluctantly and coercively bartered on the hardest 
terms ; every sign of responsibility as well as ability should be 
recognized in the interests of facilitization. The sense of in- 
justice is a dangerous and explosive thing in the human soul. 
Instances where greater attention to the nature and needs of 
the toilers themselves has demonstrably paid should be gath- 
ered and systematically presented, to show the advantages of 
the cooperative spirit and methods. Carnegie said that, given 
his business methods, he could start over again with nothing 
and reacquire his fortune. What these methods were, we 
should know and teach and see how far they illustrate or lack 
this humaniculture ; and where the latter, how at each point 
it could be best added. 

Employers should see and admit their own need of edu- 
cation, on the principle of noblesse oblige, if no other. Ad- 
vertising is now a department of psychology with its own 
literature and very educative laws with great culture power 
in education. The same is true of buying, selling, and bar- 
gaining. The experts in these lines should give up their 
secrets. There are the arts of window display. Experts here 
and there should devote themselves to exposition. The de- 
vices and experiences of drummers, who are often the very 
ablest and shrewdest business men who have perhaps been 
small or more often are to be great proprietors, should be 
gathered. The modes of accounting in banks and the devices 
used by clerks in addition, multiplication, computing interest, 
etc., should be taught and practiced in business schools, hot 
from the great firms, each in its proper place and grade; and 
so should concrete cases where experiments in profit-sharing 
have contributed experimental data. All these fields are rich 
in resources to the cleverly conducted questionnaire method 
in both its written and oral form. The same is true of modes 
of selling products in foreign lands, where other languages 
are spoken and other fashions and perhaps needs in the tex- 
ture and coloring of articles prevail. Packing, too, is often 
a fine art that would repay expert colligation and utilization. 
How consular and other reports are prepared and how meth- 



634 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ods of doing this can be improved, brought up to date, and 
made more valuable, is another theme. Tariff schedules for 
each article and how bills are prepared, class legislation carried 
through, and even detailed modes and instances of corruption, 
the principle and methods of trusts, the histories of great cor- 
porations, etc., should be taught with scientific and academic 
truthfulness. Rockefeller should contribute an accurate ac- 
count of his methods of bookkeeping. All these things should 
be given to enrich courses and bring the higher dispensation 
of business education, which now is diluted, superficial, and 
remote from vital, practical affairs and has hardly begun to do 
what it should and might. Again, every business man in the 
community should be laid under tribute to appear in person 
before classes and tell his experiences and his problems in a 
confidential way, reserving nothing which could be a great 
service to the young who have a preemptive right to all he can 
communicate that could have a stimulating and educative value. 
It is not alone the private needs of his own concern in the 
way of this or that specific quality of knowledge or skill that 
pedagogy needs, but also to know things which occupy his 
own most serious and strenuous hours. This in the larger 
interests of the future, he should confide to the rising genera- 
tion. Thus he will himself taste some of the rewards that 
go to the true teacher, and will be all the stronger for the rev- 
elation, in his own work. 

The entire industrial life of the nation is now more or less 
imperiled, so that industrial education is now imperative to 
maintain and advance our present position, if not indeed to 
prevent early decline. Present conditions of life in the great 
factory centers throughout the world are bad. This was 
strongly brought out some years ago by Arthur Shadwell.^ 
In our country commercial push, individual enterprise, leader- 
ship, have so far won our great successes. Free trade is to 
buy cheap and takes no thought of the selling price ; while pro- 
tection is to sell dear. Success does not depend upon either of 
these, but on the relations of the two to each other. A pro- 
tective tariff is a tax paid by the home community to insure 
the producer a remunerative price. It stimulates like a hot- 

* Industrial Efficiency. London, Longmans, 1906. 2 v. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 635 

house and sometimes enables companies to sell their surplus 
abroad at a very low rate. This is called " dumping." It is 
command of the home markets thus insured that enables pro- 
ducers to make combinations, control prices, and manipulate 
the markets, which they could not do were they open to all 
competitors. Labor is paid more and produces less than 
it did. 

In England, according to Shadwell, " work is a nuisance, an evil 
necessity, to be shirked and hurried over as quickly and easily as 
possible to get to the real business of life " which, as he goes on to 
say, is sports : racing, cricket, the pubHc house, pleasure, and self- 
indulgence. In winding electric coils, the rate became slower and 
slower until a single coil took ninety minutes ; then girls were put 
on " and did more before breakfast than the men did all day." Such 
leave school with no thought of duty and no sense that the position 
of the country was won by the hardship and toil of generations. 
Workers level down and not up. They would drag the industrious 
and energetic to the standards of the shirks and loafers. " Labor 
is paid more and produces less than it did, till now wages have risen 
beyond productivity." The workmen's idea of life is holidays. 
They do not use their high wages well. Instead of spending it for 
homes and saving it, it goes for drink, pleasure, and perhaps gam- 
bling. The laborers now travel at a price that does not pay the 
companies ; but they demand transportation free. Some think the 
state should feed the children of the poor. Politicians promise any- 
thing if at some one else's expense, and whatever a laborer asks is 
given him like a spoiled child, whether it is good for him or not; 
this is the rule of the nursery where children govern men. Work- 
men are ceasing to save ; their very amusements are childish, and 
the pauper spirit of dependence is growing, as the glory and honor 
of parenthood is shirked. A Russian writer says that during the last 
thirty years the English people have become mentally, morally, and 
physically rotten to the core. " The Russians would consider the 
condition of the poorest laborer in England luxurious." Politicians 
rarely tell them that their troubles are due to themselves, but indicate 
that they can be removed by an act of Parliament. One experienced 
workman advocated a judicious system of universal military service 
and thinks that this discipline would confer more real benefit on 
the laborer than a raise of thirty per cent in wages. There is very 
little of the splendid Japanese spirit of devotion to the public good. 
" A man who earns ten dollars a week and spends half of it on self- 
indulgence is demoralized by wealth no less than Hoggenheimer the 
millionaire." A certain business needs very strong, well-paid men 
with a skill that can be acquired in a few weeks; so they import 
Irish youth from Donegal; they come sober, but in a few weeks are 
the hardest drinkers of the neighborhood, destitute at the end of the 



636 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

week and clamorous for more wages. We identify progress with 
the gospel of ease. Hard work we deem an evil, discipline degrad- 
ing, sacrifice monstrous, and suffering intolerable, and duty obsolete. 
Who ever gave a pipe, a glass of beer, or a new hat, or a ticket to 
the theater during the recent hard times ? One writer estimates that 
four fifths of those who inherit wealth lead idle lives, and their 
follies and vulgar extravagances set bad examples. The hoard of 
shirkers and wastrels which the ease theory has created and the 
pressure of the unemployed are evils that are now beginning to be 
realized. This view of English conditions may be extreme, but there 
is much in it from which we should profit in this country. In 
Germany the workman has not at all been left to work out his own 
destiny, but has been guided and helped at every step by individuals, 
departments, cities, and by the state. There are factory codes, a 
scientific tariff, state insurance, organization of transports, merchant 
marine, education, poor law — everything on a high level, so that 
recovery from depression is rapid. Small as is the wage, a workman 
" can be strong, happy, and healthy, and behave like a gentleman on 
what he gets." 

In America we have trusted to audacity, push, novelty, 
inventiveness, rivah-y, cupidity, managerial control, excessive 
specialization, so that if a workman is smoothing a bit of 
ivory on one side, it is turned by machinery for the next man 
to smooth on the other. We screw up everything that is 
slack, and do all in our power to increase the output, relying 
chiefly upon the abundance of our raw material and upon our 
high tariff. Kreuzenpointner ^ thinks that without industrial 
training America cannot keep its present position more than 
twenty years because of tightening economic conditions, the 
decline in the quality and quantity of resources, and increas- 
ing population. The commission of six educators which Ger- 
many sent here in 1909 reported that it would be many years 
before American industrial education would approach the ef- 
ficiency of theirs. It will probably take twenty years for the 
masses of the people in America to reach the degree of in- 
telligence and philosophic thought necessary to do what 
should be done now. " Thus we must make a new genera- 
tion to develop the mental power of grasping the breadth and 
depth of this problem." Our habits are wasteful. The for- 
eigner can work under pinched conditions and tighten his belt. 

1 American Machinist, May 20, 1909. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 637 

He does not demand two kinds of pie in his dinner pail, nor 
would brown bread in it condemn him to the level of the 
Dago or Slovak. Some time we have got to face the com- 
petition, e. g., of the highly skilled Belgian mechanic in blue 
blouse and wooden shoes, living on sour milk, peas, lentils, 
and perhaps a little meat on Sunday. And then there is the 
Yellow Peril now looming up ominously in the distance. " If 
we had the use of five hundred million dollars and could train 
a hundred thousand teachers in a week, we should still be 
handicapped by the retarding condition of our schools, and 
especially the unfriendliness of the high schools toward it." 
Our decline in certain respects has already set in : during the 
last five years Germany has doubled her sale of machinery to 
this country, and Belgium has trebled it; although we think 
ourselves the greatest machine builders in the world. An 
American agent went to Mexico to sell goods, stayed a week 
and sold nothing. A German agent then came along speaking 
the language, knowing the money and trade relations, loafed 
about and studied one week, and the second week sold ten 
thousand dollars' worth of goods in the same line. F. J. Mil- 
ler, editor of the American Machinist, thinks German work- 
men technically overtrained and prone to depend too much 
on what they have learned in school; they cannot think in- 
dependently, and their shop experience is not sufficiently em- 
phasized. Vanderlip says that our preeminence now rests 
solely upon cheap raw material, genius for invention and com- 
bination, and cheapness of production, but not on the quality 
of goods. Industrial centers as a rule are gloomy, sordid, 
unwholesome, and utterly unfi.t for children, whose primary 
right is air, light, exercise, joy, food. Thus industrial edu- 
cation has a great national problem to solve. Why should 
it not clear our way in Porto Rico and the Philippines? 

What are the plain, cold, sun-clear facts? They are these : 
Never in all history did such a vast and varied wealth open 
to mankind as in the natural resources which the white race 
found as it advanced across this country. The soil was rich ; 
the prairies teemed with harvests without fertilization; the 
forests were wide and dense; the mines rich and varied, and 
there was natural gas and oil in abundance. Immigrants 
flocked to our shores. Everyone worked hard, and wealth 



638 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

has been accumulated by leaps and bounds and our prosperity 
has been almost unprecedented. Power and raw material 
have been abundant; our home markets vast, and stimulated 
by a high and growing protective tariff. Now, however, all 
this is rapidly changing for the worse. As the Convention 
of Governors in May, 1908, declared, " Our very civilization 
depends upon the conservation of our natural resources." Of 
the three million square miles of mainland, only one fifth is 
cultivated, and by a trifle over one third of the population. 
Prodigious as are our crops (one third of the corn, two fifths 
of the wheat, two thirds of the cotton of the world), the yield 
per acre of grain at the last census was 11.38 bushels (about 
one third the best Belgium amount), or not far above a good 
rental where cultivation is up to a high standard. Mammal 
pests destroy $100,000,000 worth annually, and insects about 
six times that amount, and most of this loss is preventable. 
Brewers take about 50,000,000 bushels of grain per year. 
We use 100,000,000,000 board feet of lumber annually, which 
will consume all our timber in about twenty years. At present 
we use up about forty-five square miles of our forests per 
day. One computation makes 500 feet per inhabitant, as 
against 60 in Europe. Forest fires, preventable at one fifth 
the wastage they cause, are responsible for about 100,000,000 
feet annually. We are so wasteful that of every 1,000 feet 
of lumber only about 320 are actually used. Roosevelt called 
the forest question " in many respects the very most vital in- 
ternal problem for our people to-day." Deforestation means 
drought and desert and loss of the soil, and as about fifty-nine 
per cent of our buildings are wood, it would also mean great 
dearth of habitation. Both gas and petroleum will fail us 
about 1950. At the present rate of increase, our anthracite 
coal will be all gone in seventy years, while our bituminous 
will last on about seven hundred years. ^ Here our chief waste 
is in processes for utilizing the energy of these heat-producing 
agencies. Carnegie thinks that in forty years all our large 
deposits of high-grade iron ore will be worked out in this 
age of steel. Copper has already begun to be exhausted, and 

1 Many of the above facts have been compiled by Professor M. G. Bogert. 
Journal of American Chemical Society, February, 1909. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 639 

that, too, just at the dawn of an age of electricity for which 
it now seems indispensable. Again, our immigrants were once 
from Great Britain, Germany, Norway, Sweden, and Swit- 
zerland. They were ambitious, industrious, skillful. Now 
Southern Europe sends hordes of unskilled and untrained 
Latins and Slavs, and those who come here grow infertile 
almost in direct proportion to the time they have been here 
and as they grow in intelligence and effectiveness. Unskilled 
labor has grown shirky in the same ratio as it has grown 
high-priced, till in some parts of the country all progress and 
prosperity are seriously handicapped. In the foreign markets 
we are already beaten on many lines and are steadily falling 
behind European lands. 

Under these conditions it is no wonder that industrial 
leaders, who in this country chiefly shape our affairs, are ask- 
ing, " How can we make our school system, upon which we 
spend more money than any other people, fit the children for 
their life-work and furnish our industries, which are the ulti- 
mate source of our national prosperity, and even existence, 
with the army of skilled and willing workers they need ? " 
Our schools were created to fit simpler conditions when the 
home was the center of industry, which is now passing to the 
factories, and before science had become vital to manufacture. 
Now, practical life has drifted away from the school and left 
it isolated and unresponsive to the needs of the time. Busi- 
ness men, says E. A. Rumley, must come to the rescue at this 
crisis and give education a new impulse. The problems here 
are of international dimensions, and we are probably on the 
eve of an educational awakening such as history has not yet 
seen. The time is at hand when we can no longer depend 
upon the abundance of our natural resources, but must put 
a larger portion of brain into brawn. We must have econ- 
omy and men who have been trained from childhood to feel 
interest and pleasure in their work and who give a full day's 
work for a full day's pay. 

The other great nations utilize their physical sciences as 
the intelligence department of industry, Germany leading par- 
ticularly in applied chemistry and physics. About all manu- 
facturing processes that transform raw material to finished 
products, on which future supremacy must depend, rest more 



640 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and more upon science and the progressive economic utiliza- 
tion of waste products which we squander. Of the total 
rainfall in this country, estimated at about ten Mississippis, 
eighty-five to ninety-five per cent is wasted in floods and 
freshets washing a billion dollars' worth of the soil into 
stream beds and the sea, and which in 1900 did damage cal- 
culated at $238,000,000, a large part of which was really 
unnecessary. Our inland and coastal waters are more and 
more polluted, and water power, upon which electricity de- 
pends, declines with the forests. 

We waste human material. That our pure-food and pure- 
drink and other hygienic laws are not enforced is notorious; 
nor is child-labor legislation, which is sO' economic of human- 
ity. It is said that in no state or city of this Union is legal 
provision made for the rest of working women approaching 
or after confinement, which is so necessary for the welfare 
of their offspring. The insurance against sickness is hardly 
begun and old-age pensions are really but iridescent deside- 
rata, while the slaughter and maiming of thousands of work- 
men by accident which might be prevented is appalling. 
Moral sanitation, too, lags and loiters. A nation that has so 
unprecedently lost its sympathetic touch with childhood, as 
I have elsewhere shown that we have done, has in so doing, 
of course, necessarily lost vital contact with the future in 
which our children are to live. No race probably was ever 
so unmindful of posterity. We are so content with happy- 
go-lucky ways, so in love with laisses faire, so implicitly trust- 
ful of destiny and so convinced that the voice of the average 
man is the voice of God, so sure that everything will go 
boomingly on with an ever-accelerating rate of progress, that, 
enervated as we are by our prosperity and inflated with our 
sense of greatness, it is hard for us to grasp the great prob- 
lems that confront us. We are sunk in the present, proud of 
the fact that we are in a sense a fiat nation with only a rudi- 
mentary historical sense. We have no time to think how we 
shall look as ancestors to our successors a century hence, or 
what kind of social, industrial, moral, to say nothing of bio- 
logical, heredity we may be handing on to them. 

We must add to the vast wastage of human culture avoida- 
ble friction between capital and labor and the loss of sympathy 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 641 

where a community of interests should make for unity and soli- 
darity. Unrestricted competition dumps men and women in the 
scrap heap the moment fresher and more remunerative recruits 
can be found to take their place. The greater the corporation 
or trust, the more soulless, impersonal, and irresponsible it be- 
comes, and this is the land and age of great trusts to whom 
everything seems allowable that would increase dividends year 
by year. The adventurous, not to say gambling, spirit is in 
the very atmosphere that risks and takes chances to the limit, 
small if not large, provided there is possibility of golden real- 
ization, ever so faint though it be. Everywhere this tendency 
is helped on by promoters and all the seductive psychological 
arts of advertising, till most of the best of our common peo- 
ple take hazards with fortune with at least a margin of their 
resources. Since the depression a few years ago, even we 
teachers, scanty though our means be, are flooded with allur- 
ing prospectuses of new and old business ventures and get- 
rich-quick schemes in which we are importuned to embark. 
I have a pile of these a foot high when opened flat that have 
accumulated within a few months, and our leisure and our 
homes are often invaded by plausible and often quite impres- 
sive strangers who would sell or even give us shares of stock 
specially designed to yield large and sure returns to the 
meager savings of people engaged in our noble but poorly 
paid vocation. These itinerant and insistent peddlers of se- 
curities, gentlemanly though they be, sometimes have to be 
excluded from our academic halls and buildings. The arts of 
the able army of drummers are often too much for retailers, 
who are induced to overbuy and then in turn crowd their 
wares upon their customers. Our selling agencies are so 
effective that who does not know women who are unable to 
resist the blandishments of clerks or the temptations to buy 
or the intoxication of the shop window and the bargain coun- 
ter and mark-down sales. In some cases they fill home, clos- 
ets, and bedrooms with an accumulation of things purchased, 
piled, unused and unopened, and sometimes forgotten, so fas- 
cinating is its very fancy of cheapness and so exciting to 
artificial wants not based on needs. 

Again, in our advocacy of peace and arbitration we should 
not forget the advantages of military education and what the 
43 



642 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

world owes to war. It has slaughtered millions of the best, 
strongest, and most patriotic, and left the feeble at home to 
propagate the race. It has also promoted robust physical 
and moral training, and is so rapidly improving that many 
thoughtful men have urged that its benefits should now be 
extended. H. Birchenough^ advocates that military training be 
made compulsory for every active British lad from about fif- 
teen to nineteen, as a kind of continuation school, not primarily 
to make the country more efficient in war, but for its moral 
and practical value for physical betterment and the increase 
of industrial efficiency. In Germany, as all know, the attain- 
ment of a certificate as Einjdhriger, or one year volunteer 
which is granted to those who attain Obersecunda in a first- 
class gymnasium, or Realschule, at seventeen or eighteen, or 
a higher grade in other schools, stimulates thousands of Ger- 
man youth to stay at school up to this point, as otherwise 
they would have to serve two years in the infantry and three 
in the cavalry or four in the navy. This stage confers con- 
siderable social distinction. The volunteer must board him- 
self, supply his uniform, and very likely lives at home most 
of the time except six weeks. He can choose his own year 
from eighteen to twenty-three — under certain conditions to 
twenty-six. This, of course, means a certain standard of 
ability and training, and employers have come to attach great 
value to this. Moreover, all who serve this one or who take the 
otherwise required two years, although they interrupt their 
careers (and many have come to our shores in the past to 
escape this obligation), are now more and more thought to 
be benefited by it, on the whole, as is the country at large. 
The military service is a kind of liberal education for youth 
in the humbler walks of life. It gives much advantage of 
travel and association, and, better yet, young men learn the 
benefits of discipline, duty, regularity, plain living, habits of 
hard work, neatness, obedience to authority, a sense of honor, 
love of the fatherland, better ideas of hygiene. It is, on the 
whole, a splendid setting-up drill, and those who have had it 
emerge from this barrack life almost always better in health 

• Birchenough, H. : Compulsory Education and Compulsory Military Training. 
Nineteenth Century, 1904. Vol. 56, pp. 20-27. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 643 

and morale, with larger intellectual interests, with a quick- 
ened sense of loyalty and devotion to the country. The recent 
reforms in the army and the new responsibilities which officers 
take for their men and the moral instruction they give, I have 
pointed out in Chapter IV, It should be added that a knowl- 
edge of military affairs is a vast culture domain of its own. 
One needs only glance through a military encyclopedia or turn 
the leaves of such serious studies as Poten,^ Tardieu,^ S. R. 
Steinmetz,^ or study Nietzsche to realize the advantages of 
the aggressive soldierly spirit and attitude. To be chosen by 
the state, taken away from the home environment, and made 
to serve the fatherland with a possibility of offering up life 
upon one's country's altar gives seriousness, poise, and right 
orientation, implants not only love of the flag, but esprit de 
corps and regimentation. It abolishes rank and social sta- 
tion, and brings a spirit of comradeship, a feeling of good 
fellowship that may persist through life, and it is believed 
that now the army is rapidly becoming in all civilized lands 
a more effective school for personal virtue than ever before. 
It brings, too, its own peculiar sense of honor. 

Here, too, should be mentioned the suggestion made by 
Carlyle, Kingsley, and more elaborated by Ruskin, and now 
by adherents of the Peace Movement, that great advantages 
could be secured by drafting or enlisting, or even, in some 
cases, requiring, criminals for a term of years to engage in 
great public works for the public good. This they thought 
a moral equivalent of war. Militant Christianity has long 
praised and besung the virtues of the Christian soldier whose 
aggressiveness is moral and directed against sin. But the same 
spirit could be given a more definite direction should our Gov- 
ernment open conscription offices and enroll young men to 
dredge in rivers and harbors and at Panama, to serve the state 
or community in all the great industrial enterprises of state 
or city, to clean streets and sewers, to build irrigation dams 

'Poten, B.: Geschichte des Militar-erziehungs- und Bildungswesens in den 
Landen deutscher Zunge. Monumenta Germanias Paedagogica, Vols, i, 2, 3, 5 
and 15. 

- Tardieu, Eugene: Notions de Psychologic et leurs applications a I'education 
militaire. Bruxelles. 1898 p. 

3 Die Philosophic des Kriegs. Leipzig, Earth, 1907. 352 p. 



644 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

and systems, to work in squads and under command for a 
definite term, with desertion penalized and duties enforced by 
military methods. Why could not the same beneficent results 
be accomplished as by training for war? The morale of our 
soldiers whom Roosevelt made to dig is said to have been 
greatly improved thereby, and this experience made them 
better soldiers. All this work must not be tainted by the 
spirit of the chain gang, and seems at first hardly compatible 
with the spirit of free institutions, for it would deprive men 
of the full recompense for their toil, and would have some 
taints or traits of slavery about it which it would take gen- 
erations to remove. To educate public sentiment so as to 
make it as honorable to dredge as to maneuver and parade 
is a gigantic task, especially if this work began with wastrels 
at the bottom of the social and industrial scale. It would be 
long indeed before free-born voters could give their consent 
to be made to work for their country's or their own good. 
If the idealists, philosophers, and sociologists who advocate 
such plans would shoulder the pick and shovel and lead the 
way, demonstrating in themselves, as well they perhaps might, 
the benefits of such a course, this might give it a certain 
initial momentum. If the Government could properly support 
and pay a great industrial army as its employees, sure of per- 
manent jobs, always under orders to go wherever or do what- 
ever was required, and also ready to take up arms and fight 
in case of war, but trained to do this only incidentally, that 
might indeed be a boon. This, however, would require a 
rather elaborate scheme of industrial education as well as hos- 
pitals, provision for the aged, infirm, and those accidentally 
injured, for wives and children, and perhaps, if the Govern- 
ment assumes control of public resources and of all public util- 
ity and service, corporations, railroads, telephones, telegraphs, 
public lands, something like this may eventually be feasible. 
Such an army would make for peace rather than war, as in- 
dustry does, for work would predominate. It might tend to 
bring the Government down to more economic business meth- 
ods, but we are as yet far from knowing how to conduct our 
public affairs as economically as those controlled by private 
enterprises. Until a city or state has learned to do its busi- 
ness as effectively as private concerns, such a dream as this 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 645 

would not be capable of realization. To increase the num- 
ber of officeholders, or of those who live and work for the 
state, would also mean to implant in our schools the spirit 
now deprecated in France, whose youth are often criticised 
as ambitious chiefly to get a place and salary and a badge 
or uniform in the service of the state. At present, speculation 
in these directions may be safely left to those who cultivate 
the 191 5, 1925, 2000 movements. They are interesting, but 
are not without some tendency to divert attention from the 
duty of the present hour which focuses on the next step, which 
certainly seems to be now to give a more industrial trend to 
our entire educational system and await results. 

Commercial education in this country began with the 
Bryant and Stratton chain of business colleges about the mid- 
dle of the last century, and was greatly advanced by the 
career of S. S. Packard, who devoted more than forty years 
to this work.^ These were private, popular, often charged 
a high fee, and trained clerks and amanuenses. When stenog- 
raphy and typewriting came in, they were quick to discern 
their value, and added them and prolonged their course. 
C. B. Ellis ^ says they came in as a protest against school 
systems that did not train for life and their inability to hold 
boys, and to give those not going on a chance. Some of these 
were very successful, such as the Heffley School of Commerce 
of Brooklyn, with some twenty-five instructors; Long Island 
Business College, with sixteen ; Albany, with twenty-one ; 
Woods' School of Business and Shorthand, with twelve; 
Eastman Business College at Poughkeepsie, with twenty-five; 
and Rochester Business Institution, with fifteen, and many 
others. Portions of this work were later introduced into 
public and private high schools, till in 1900 there were 2,350 

1 See James, E. J., Commercial Education. In N. M. Butler ed., Education 
in the United States. Albany, J. B. Lyon. 1900. 51 p. 2 v. Also Great Britain, 
Diplomatic and Consular Service. Report on Commercial Education in the United 
States. London, Harrison, 1899, 55 p. Also Supplement to Fifth Year Book 
of the National Herbart Society for 1899. Commercial Education, by C. A. 
Herrick, pp. 113-229. 1900. 

= Ellis, C. B.: Commercial Education in Secondary Schools. Education, 1902, 
V. 22, pp. 631-637. See also U. S. Bureau of Statistics. Industrial Education and 
Industrial Conditions in Germany. Illus. Wash., Govt. Print., 1905. 323 p. 
(Special consular repts., v. 2>Z-) 



646 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

institutions of all grades, with 131,518 students, 71,000 of 
which were in public high schools or colleges employing 1,196 
men and 583 women as teachers. Next in frequency came 
the private high schools, then normal schools. Bookkeeping 
gave a content to arithmetic, and a boy who could not apply 
himself to " sums " would work hours to find an error in a 
trial balance sheet. Shorthand, too, teaches much about lan- 
guage, requires concentration, and keeps the pupil out of a 
muddled state of mind ; while typography cultivates far more 
than manual skill and puts a premium upon neatness, accuracy, 
and good English. The work thus has a high-culture value. 
It came in under protest from the culturists, who feared that 
the school would be " transformed into an office, counting- 
room, or bank." Young Americans may lack native aptitude 
for skilled industries, but they have great ability and taste for 
commercial activities. These courses have been more or less 
enlarged and enriched, till now it may be said that business 
education in this country has acquired some solid standing. 

In 1881 Joseph Wharton, of Philadelphia, established there a 
school of finance and economy, which, although it encountered many 
obstacles, was developed with great energy and sagacity by Professor 
E. J. James, who was sent to Europe to study this department of 
education, and made a very valuable report,^ in which his many 
addresses and articles upon the subject are summed up. If the Uni- 
versity of Pennsylvania would work with, instead of opposing, the 
magnificent commercial museum in that city, the best of its kind 
in the world, as it has evolved under the leadership of W. P. Wil- 
son, this city might easily be the leader and light in this field. The 
year 1900 was significant in this history, for it saw the opening of de- 
partments of commercial education in the Universities of Chicago, 
Missouri, West Virginia, Louisiana, Nevada, Vermont, Wisconsin, 
Michigan, Ohio, Arizona, New York, Dartmouth College, the Florida, 
Montana, and New Mexico and Georgia Schools of Agriculture. 
The best of these have valuable courses in diplomacy, business or- 
ganization, finance, insurance, transportation, accounts, advertising, 
city organization and charter, demography, public opinion, race con- 
tact, panic and depression, legal decisions, economic history, trade 
routes, tariff, growth of water transportation, and many others. On 
the other hand, too many of these courses are scissors and paste 

'James, E. J.: The Education of Business Men; a View of the Organization 
and Courses of Study in the Commercial High Schools of Europe. Chicago. 
University Press, 1898. 232 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 647 

products, where portions of history, political economy, modern lan- 
guages, certain topics in applied science, a course by a law pro- 
fessor, and perhaps one from the agricultural school which had been 
devised to meet other needs, have been rudely whacked together 
into a course to attract students in this field. The Tuck School 
at Dartmouth, with a fund of $300,000, aided by the Thayer 
School of Civil Engineering, is only open to college seniors or 
graduates who have attained a standard of seventy-five per cent. 
It " boldly limits itself to picked men who have completed at least 
three years of college work and are candidates for degrees." It 
includes economic and monetary theory, elementary law, sociology, 
anthropological geography, social statistics, correspondence, public 
speaking, and at least two modern languages. After a year of this 
work it embraces financial problems, commerce, insurance, and has 
a faculty of ten men.^ In 1908 Harvard opened a Graduate School 
of Business Administration, with seventeen regular instructors and 
aided by many outside lawyers and brokers. The Y. M. C. A. has 
opened more elementary schools. 

Of course, Europe is fifty years ahead of us in time. Ad- 
vocates of this scheme claim that the old idea of beginning 
at the bottom, sweeping the store and running errands, is 
superseded, and that business men can now educate their sons 

^ John Wanamaker has a trade school or commercial institute connected with 
his department store in Philadelphia which has lately been chartered under the 
ambitious title of "The American University of Apphed Commerce and Trades." 
The beginnings were made some fourteen years ago and there are now nearly eight 
thousand graduates. The smaller boys have a school session two mornings a week 
before they go on duty at ten, and three hundred older boys have two evening 
sessions weekly after a hot supper in the store dining room. There are twenty- 
four teachers, some of them from the public schools. A military battalion with a 
garden for drill is a lesson in obedience, precision, and health; military band, drum 
corps, and summer vacations spent in tenting like soldiers on a five-acre camp 
ground at Island Heights, New Jersey, with headquarters at the barrack by the 
sea. The girls, too, have military drill, drum and bugle corps, band, singing, 
mandolin clubs, saving funds, classes in French and German for those who have 
to go abroad in their business dealings. When these youths graduate with a 
diploma, they are full-fledged members of the staff, fitted for some well-defined 
division. There are special class rooms, library, reading room, gymnasium, 
swimming pool. This system is the pivot of the organization of the store staff, 
determining position, wages, and advancement. The work is said to have grown 
out of the author's realization of the sacred obligations of employer to employee 
and his recognition that a business career is now a profession and a specialty. 
High marks here have a monej' value. We are not told, however, how far these 
pupils are initiated into the general plan and method of the business as a whole. 
This would seem to be a matter of vital importance. Many other firms have 
introduced more or less educational facilities for their employees. 



648 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

with great precision to take their places, and the prejudice 
many of them have had against college graduates is no doubt 
abating. A very large and rapidly increasing proportion of 
college students now intend to go into business rather than 
into a profession, for the former is not overcrowded. Surely 
there is no reason, as the late C. K. Adams said, " why the 
state should provide means for educating lawyers, physicians, 
engineers, pharmacists, and agriculturists, that would not 
equally apply to the education of business men." Many new 
lines call loudly for the highest grade of business ability, and 
on the wisdom with which all this is managed the happiness 
of thousands of families depends. Probably the majority of 
the talent of this country is absorbed in these occupations. 
While experience is important, there is a vast body of knowl- 
edge here that could be organized and taught in schools with 
great advantage. Our foreign trade as early as 1890 had 
reached an aggregate of two thousand billion dollars, our 
sales exceeding our purchases by five hundred million.^ We 
demand a new and rare class of men to manage this, and there 
is great need of foreign agents for American goods with bet- 
ter training. We have found that we can surpass other coun- 
tries in the perfection and cheapness of most labor-saving 
machines, in the building and operation of railroads, con- 
struction of bridges, shoes, steel, hand-power tools, engines, 
mining, and much electrical machinery. We can give more 
for the money in these lines. One cause of our great success 
is the " freedom of commercial intercourse between the states, 
which has furnished a tremendous home market and enabled 
us to be specialists in all these branches of manufacturing and 
to turn out nearly everything in wholesale quantities. These 
cheapening and perfecting processes are still advancing by 
leaps and bounds, notwithstanding they have already put us 
far in advance of other nations." Now the question is, how 
to get the full advantages of the world's market. We lack 
trained men to solicit business. Our engineers are engaged 
in great constructions the world over, but we do not fit 

1 See an admirable presentation with 85 charts. The World's Commerce and 
Am. Industry, by J. J. Macfarlane. Phil. Com. Museum, 1903, 112 p. See also 
Commercial Raw Materials, their Origin, Preparation and Uses, by C. R. Tooth- 
aker. Boston, Ginn & Co. 1907, 108 p., with maps and hundreds of materials. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 



649 



youth to go, e. g., to Mexico and South America to explore 
and exploit. The best European schools do just this, teach- 



THE MONEY VALUE OF TECHNICAL TRAINING 

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ing the language, resources, climate, tastes, methods, fitting 
young men for agents and for consuls. Our consular reports 



650 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

cannot be compared with the best in Europe, rapidly as they 
are improving. Our leading business men wish their sons 
educated. Many of them were not, and have endowed col- 
leges and universities, realizing their own deficiencies. The 
colleges should repa}?- this debt by better interpreting just what 
the sense of need of their founders was and meant. Again, 
it has been said that about ninety-five per cent of business 
men have failed at some time in their career and that the right 
education would tend to prevent this and to make business a 
source of greater pleasure as well as of profit. 

Here, as in industrial education, the old prejudice of the 
culturists has been both strong and pervasive. The sentiment 
of college youth ranks those in the regular academic course 
above those in the commercial as in the other practical de- 
partments. Even Professor Laughlin ^ says " the essential 
aim of the college of commerce and of administration should 
not be technical but disciplinary." He adds that it should not 
merely give useful information, but principles, mental grasp, 
teach men to think, etc. Says another prominent educator: 
" It is not the business of the commercial high school to train 
stenographers or bookkeepers, amanuenses or private secre- 
taries, any more than it is the business of the manual train- 
ing school to make boys carpenters or blacksmiths." What 
is wanted is broad foundations. For one, I believe that the 
time has come when we must say this is exactly wrong and 
our ideals and methods of training here must be reversed, that 
we must give first of all deftness and skill of hand and effi- 
cacy in work, and that on this basis the whole intellectual 
structure can be built both higher and more securely. We 
must reconstruct our ideals of liberal culture, which is by no 
means limited to literature and mathematics and language. 

One reason why continental Europe was ahead of us in appre- 
ciating the need of this training, if not in making it more effective, 
is because of free trade, which abolished the bulwarks that pro- 
tected manufacturers. Originally commercial schools in Austria, 

1 Laughlin, J. Lawrence: Higher Commercial Education. Atlantic Monthly, 
May, 1902. Vol. 89, No. 135, pp. 677-686. See, too, a valuable and extensive 
collection of opinions made by R. T. Crane of Chicago: Utility of all Kinds of 
Higher Schooling for Young Men who have to earn their own Living. Pub. by 
the author, 1910, 331 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 651 

as Rumbold says, were started by wholesale tradesmen, both for 
sons of the higher classes and for poor youths, for whom scholar- 
ships were decreed. As, however, ninety-five per cent of the busi- 
ness here consisted in small dealings, the schools did not provide 
for the bulk of trade requirements. The foundations were really 
laid in Prague in 1856, Vienna in 1857, Kratz in 1854, while in 1888 
the Ministry of Public Instruction granted subventions to commer- 
cial schools founded by gilds, corporations, and chambers of com- 
merce.^ Of some sixty commercial high schools in the German 
Empire, with nearly 6,000 pupils, the support is varied or divided 
among cities, gilds, states, while many courses in Realc schools 
exist. It was a great step when for the better class of these schools 
the government allowed the one year military service. The Public 
Commercial Institute at Leipzig, one of the best and oldest, orig- 
inated in the Merchants' Guild in 1497, which in 1868 became a 
general society under the Chamber of Commerce. It gives general 
and special training to apprentices, and also scientific training for 
commerce. Merchants send their sons here. Theory is rather prom- 
inent on the view that it makes the young learn more from experi- 
ence, and teaches them to act with energy and decision in new and 
difficult situations. It is owing to schools of this kind that Germany 
has steadily diminished the many disadvantages of her position, and 
that even the trade of England in its details is, to an increasing 
extent, passing into the hands of those trained in Germany who have 
settled in London, The highest institution in this field in Germany, 
called the Commercial University, was established at Leipzig in 
April, 1898, by business men under the Chamber of Commerce, and 
with the approval of the Minister of the Interior and of the Aca- 
demic Senate, and has already done a great service in teaching the 
dignity of business as a vocation. It is under twelve men repre- 
senting various bodies. It admits chiefly graduates from Reale 
schools and Gymnasia. Only by special permission can a student 
here devote a portion of his time to work in the university. There 
is a seminary department for training commercial school-teachers, 
with a two years' course. 

The first institution of this kind in Austria was opened in 1770, 
but had a checkered and unsuccessful career. In 1856 the Chamber 
of Trade and Commerce established a general mercantile institute 
at Vienna. Here the pupils regularly visit public collections, estab- 
lishments, and are sent even to the great commercial centers of the 
East. Tuition is high and it includes law, products, life insur- 
ance, electricity, traffic, monopolies, traveling fellowships, etc. This 
Vienna Commercial Academy has the largest attendance of any 

1 See Schmitt, H. : Die kaufmannische Fortbildungs-Schulen Berlins. Siegis- 
mund, Berlin, 1891. Also F. Glasser: Das komerzielle Bildungs-Wesen in Oest- 
reich. Also Lante: Ecole d'Commerce, Oudat. The Duty of the Merchant. De- 
vinck: Commercial Practice and Basis of Law. Guillmalt: Industrial Economy, 



652 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

school of its kind in Germany or France, with twenty-three pro- 
fessors in all. 

The Commercial Academy of Prague opened in 1850 in the 
Polytechnic Institute, Bohemia being a land of many trades. Its 
policy is to receive boys before apprenticeship rather than after 
experience. It has a good library, collection of products, coins, natu- 
ral history museum, etc., and teaches French, German, English, Ital- 
ian, and Spanish correspondence. The Vienna Export Academy, 
founded in 1898, has weekly conferences under the chairmanship of 
the Minister of Commerce, to whom the teachers make weekly re- 
ports. It trains clerks for .exporting firms, it being very hard for an 
Austrian exporter to find markets. Its members visit typical export es- 
tablishments under guidance, often at distant places, and tise the Royal 
Commercial Museum with its maps, trade collections, etc. The disci- 
pline is strict, and unexcused absence for eight days brings expulsion. 

The German press has discussed at great length the reorganiza- 
tion of the consular service, since it is no longer an agricultural 
state alone, but has colonies. The old system, represented by trained 
lawyers and diplomats without personal acquaintance with commer- 
cial values and mercantile usages, was inadequate. It is proposed 
to assign trained attaches to each important consulate, to abolish 
permanent consuls, and put in their places experienced merchants 
who will give the office a distinctly commercial character and leave 
to the attaches the legal and purely official duties now put upon the 
chief. This latter work must be a life career, for which the best 
are selected by competitive examination. The world will be divided 
into four or five districts, for each of which the pupil will be 
educated according to his choice — e. g., China, Japan, the East 
Indies, South America, the United States, etc. Each prepares for 
and is assigned to one of these fields, and plans to spend his life 
there. Hitherto the world has constituted but one district. An 
officer who began at Pekin might be transferred to Buenos Ayres, 
later to Odessa, and then to Palermo, in each of which he would 
lose the use of languages and the acquaintance with persons and 
conditions. This scheme would make consuls like subsidized steamer 
lines for pushing German trade throughout the world. Officialism 
will be sacrificed to pure utility.^ 

The beginning of commercial education in Japan was a private 
business school in 1875 at Tokyo. There are now twenty-seven 
public commercial schools turning out some three hundred well- 
trained men yearly. These are higher, ordinary, and elementary. 
The first is represented only by the higher commercial college or- 
ganized in 1885 somewhat after the plan of that at Antwerp, al- 
though lately raised to a higher grade. The government sends the 
best of these students abroad, perhaps six at a time, to different coun- 
tries, for studying different lines of work. Attached to it is a college 

1 Mason, F. H.: U. S. Con. Reports, 1888-89, v. 2, p. 1438. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 653 

of foreign languages — Chinese, Korean, Russian, French, English, 
Spanish, and German. The faculty numbers nearly a score. The 
idea throughout is practical. Interpreters are trained. Teachers 
act as judges and pupils as plaintiffs and defendants. Western 
business ways are practiced — e. g., a bank is in one corner, a side 
room is a customs house, with clerks running to and fro with bills 
of lading, getting them accepted, selling to brokers. Commercial 
morality is a prominent topic here, including an outline of modern 
ethical science, the nature of ethics in business, the mode of form- 
ing virtuous habits in trade. No other commercial school has such 
a department, and it has been much criticised, and in a land of so 
many faiths it could not rest upon religion ; but the effort is to 
make headway against sharp bargaining that seeks to get wealth 
from all purchasers by every method tolerated by an imperfect law. 
" No fog ever baffled a sailor more completely than the dual code 
of morality, the outgrowth of a degenerate mercantile system that 
has blinded and misled the people all over the world. The true 
standard of business dealing has been hidden and needs to be 
brought to light." Physical training is emphasized, for all must 
serve at least one year in the army after graduation, two years 
being deducted. There are two departments — domestic and foreign. 
The students form corporations. One delegate from this school, 
Zensaku Sanc,^ writes disparagingly of some of our business college 
professors, finding one who did not know the meaning of common 
phrases. This is a school for consuls. In the Commercial Museum 
each article has a ticket stating its origin, price, etc. These schools 
have helped Japanese commerce, although still in its infancy, to 
realize that trade " is the war of peace," and that its soldiers require 
efficient training. 

Austin Lee points out that in 1889 only about 2,000 students in 
France received commercial instruction, although about 400,000 
youth each year entered on a business career. The next year, in 
1890, the certificate of graduation from the best commercial schools 
in France entitled pupils to a reduction of the term of military 
service from three years to one, provided they attained an average 
mark of sixty-five per cent. This brought at once new life into 
these institutions. Higher commercial instruction in France may 
be said to have begun with the plan of two merchants in 1820, who 
established L'Ecole Superienre de Commerce, founded on an idea 
the practical value of which was long discussed. It passed through 
a long period of groping and frequent change, almost ruin, and only 
since 1869 has it had a continuous existence unbroken by crisis or 
calamity. It receives resident and day pupils, who must be at least 
fifteen, and receives them on the basis of examination, from which, 
however, graduates of the Lycee with the baccalaureate degree are 

J Commercial Education in Japan. Great Britain. Special Reports on 
Educational Subjects. 1902, v. 8, pp. 555-567. 



654 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

exempt. There are many examinations, grades, types of diploma, 
with models and rewards, and the usual minute prescriptions by 
the government. This school has served as a model for others, not 
only in France, but elsewhere. Stress is laid on the motto " Com- 
merce oblige," and upon honesty, initiative, perseverance, rather than 
on routine clerical qualities. A quarterly bulletin issues interesting 
papers upon social as well as economic subjects. Commerce is hard 
to teach. The Chamber of Commerce bought this school in 1869, 
and in 1876 offered traveling scholarships to those who had written 
the best reports upon the factories, mines, etc., they had visited, 
entitling the holder to spend the summer in other countries investi- 
gating questions suggested by the Chamber. In 1890 six others 
like it were established. Foreigners are admitted if there are vacan- 
cies. The course covers a wide range of topics, and the final mark 
is based not upon the answers given on fixed days, but it is sought 
to thwart the clever devices of crammers who violate the laws of 
education. The law specifies five excuses only which can be ac- 
cepted. In 1898 it moved to better quarters, and has a fine museum, 
laboratory, dining room, and sanatorium. L'Ecole des Hautes Etudes 
Coimnerciales is very slightly higher, and since 1894 has had a 
normal section for the training of commercial teachers. Candidates 
must be at least twenty, and day pupils are admitted. These schools 
suffer because of the social ambitions of students, which have caused 
France to be overrun with a learned proletariat pursuing ambitions 
they have little chance to satisfy, while the strife still rages between 
the technical and purely educational ideals. The Commercial Insti- 
tute in Wagram Avenue, founded in 1884, specializes on the export 
trade. There are also five schools of a similar type in cities outside 
Paris, while there are three primary schools of commerce in Paris 
and one in the Provinces. Those at Lyon, Marseilles, and Havre 
are controlled by private corporations. These higher institutions 
have very comprehensive courses. They teach customs, banking, 
exchange, insurance, syndicates, interest, discount, commerce, mon- 
etary systems, modes of bookkeeping, inventories, various types of 
merchandise, combustibles, vegetable, animal, and mineral products, 
testing, analysis, civil, industrial, and marine law of various coun- 
tries, brokers' agents, commissions, bonders, invoices, quittances, 
receipts, card samples, inland and seaport markets, letters of credit, 
clearing houses, bills of lading, many kinds of bookkeeping, ware- 
houses, savings, loans, premiums, middlemen, commissions, inter- 
national weights, measures and money, stocks, bonds, daily quota- 
tions, consuls, annuities, lotteries, tret, wear and tear, pensions, with 
a great deal about materials and the chemistry and physics applied 
to them, such as fertilizers, resins, amber, rubber, oils, building 
material, quarrying, tiles, modes of paving, plasters, forestry, with 
considerable attention each to iron, steel, brass, zinc, tin, silver, gold, 
bismuth, lead, mercury, platinum, alloys, glass, horn, shell, ivory, 
glues, feathers, hair, bristles, silk, wool, flax, jute, cotton spin- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 655 

ning, textiles, spools, threads, draperies, sugar, drinks, chalks, soaps, 
milk, tea, coffee, races, religion, climates, etc. Considerable stress 
is laid on the history of commerce from the Phcenicians down, the 
great mediaeval highways by land and sea, fairs, effects of wars, and 
of the discoveries of the new world, commercial basis of the great- 
ness of Italy and Flanders, commercial bubbles, inflations, blockades, 
Zollvereins, commercial treaties, panics, merchant marine, Suez. 
Canal, colonies, chambers of commerce, consuls, rights of domicile, 
marriage, wills, franchises, mortgages, competency of minors, mar- 
ried women, power of attorney, indorsements, privateers, abandon- 
ment of ships, trade-marks, labels, counterfeiting, slavery, serfdom, 
absenteeism, pauperism, budgets, proportionate, progressive, land, 
stamp and surtaxes, duties, custom houses, frontiers, telegraphs, tele- 
phones, elevators, jetties, floating docks, tide ports. There were, 
however, still in France, in 1900, 103 chambers of commerce that 
had done nothing in this line. 

One of the oldest and most famous European colleges of com- 
merce was founded at Antwerp half a century ago to- enable bright 
young men to advance rapidly. The regular pupils, as opposed to 
free pupils, obtain a diploma in two years. Each may choose a 
foreign language he desires to be competent to correspond in, Rus- 
sian included. Traveling scholars make reports, often utilized by 
the government. Arthur Herbart reports that in Sweden commer- 
cial education is entirely private, the state aiding three schools, while 
in Norway C. Dundus describes two classes, private and municipal, 
the best being at Christiania, which is open to both sexes. In 
Switzerland B. C. Lowther describes more than a score of such 
schools, in which there is much local diversity. Some of them are 
gratuitous under the government, some coeducational ; some aid 
their graduates to find employment. In all, business firms are vis- 
ited, and there are samples of merchandise and libraries. A. Peel 
reports twenty-two commercial schools. In Italy, Mr. Alban Young 
describes the Royal Higher School of Commerce, at Venice, founded 
in 1868, with a special consular course of five years. Another was 
established at Bari in 1873, with a model office to train for business 
and for consulates. Raikes, in a report presented to Parliament in 
February, 1909, describes twelve such schools in Belgium. In 1887 
the state universities were empowered to give the degree of Superior 
Licentiate of Commercial and Consular Science. Most of these 
schools are due to private enterprise. In Denmark there are several 
schools, the chief being at Copenhagen, which has had a checkered 
history for nearly a hundred years. Here, however, there is no 
curtailment of military service, and the students are not held, but 
drop off into offices as soon as possible. These are not trade schools, 
but schools of trade. 

There is no institution in Great Britain that can fairly be called 
a commercial high school, although there is just now a movement 
in this direction. To this lack may be attributed the growing dis- 



656 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

placement of English youth in the great business houses of London 
by Frenchmen, Germans, and Italians. Instead of beginning this 
work by teaching, London did so in a characteristic English way by 
establishing examinations, granting commercial certificates to all 
who could pass ; but it was soon found that there were no properly 
qualified teachers, so that this work has not been successful. 

If skilled labor requires the most specialized, commerce 
and trade require probably the most general of all kinds of 
education. He who would buy cheapest and sell dearest must 
have some knowledge of the markets of the world, or at least 
of those parts not walled from him by a prohibitive tariff. 
He must know raw materials, and these are a vast number, 
must know something of all the chief processes by which fin- 
ished commodities are prepared, how things are put up, how 
to find buyers, where to ship, etc. If our selling agencies are 
perhaps overefficient for our home markets, as shown above, 
they are not sufficiently so to cope with our competitors in 
other lands in selling abroad, so that we are relatively out- 
stripped in foreign markets, notably just now in South Amer- 
ica, for trade knows no Monroe Doctrine. Of all the stu- 
pendous new problems now opening to the newer and greater 
education of the future, none exceeds in magnitude and in- 
tricacy the question whether we can educate for business in 
this sense. England, the chief of modern commercial powers, 
in many respects, is only at this moment beginning to attempt 
it, and of most of the few score great captains of industry 
who control the business of the country there are but few 
who yet believe that any course of business training that is 
possible would have helped them much in their work. They 
hold that to learn it one must plunge in early in life, and that 
no royal road to success could be laid out. They have no 
ability and no wish to impart to others the real secrets of 
their achievements, unless in platitudinous counsels to the 
young to be good, temperate, to save, work hard, etc. More- 
over, if they could and would write an autobiography intime, 
the shifts and devices by which they formulated and solved 
their own critical and original problems would not always be 
edifying or even ethical, while conditions are also changing" 
so fast that anyone who copied them would be left behind. 
Again, while teacher and class can visit factories, trade is not 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 657 

capable of being so well demonstrated object-lessonwise, for 
its operations only center in offices, but they can be studied 
only where markets are. Retailers, too, would hardly be dis- 
posed to open all the conditions upon which their profits de- 
pend. To know a business seems to demand apprenticeship 
to it. If Carnegie, Rockefeller, Morgan, Hill, and others 
would each give a course of lectures in some of the new col- 
lege schools of commerce or business, each of which should 
be a heart-to-heart talk to advanced and select students, with 
no reporters admitted, and each be confined to his own special 
line of endeavor, describe frankly his chief problems and just 
how his great coups were made and tell of his private meth- 
ods and secret rules, then we should have indeed a new 
fashion set in education and new vital currents open from 
the office of the great trust to the college. I wonder if some- 
thing like this will not one day be a demand laid upon those 
who have been prosperous ! It might be regarded as a higher 
type of charity, establishing a new and personal bond between 
successful senescents and aspiring adolescents. To give a 
vast fortune wisely is said to be even harder than to acquire it. 
It is a splendid new instinct of old age unknown to Cicero, 
who described old age in such inspiring terms. The passion of 
these youth who long, above all things, to get rich honorably 
is like every other interest, capable of vast service for peda- 
gogy if it can be turned on. Probably with most of the 
ablest young Americans this is the very strongest of all their 
desires, for which they would do and sacrifice more than for 
anything else. Now, this zest largely runs to waste pedagog- 
ically. It is at least an appetite that is fed on very scanty 
and ill-adapted food. More than by rendering financial aid, 
these great leaders could help young men who most of all 
desire to follow in their footsteps, by letting them hear from 
their own lips how they proceeded, where and why they 
failed in this point and won in that, something of what they 
regret as well as what they approve in their own careers. Con- 
fessions of this sort are supremely good for the souls both 
of those who make and for those who hear them, especially 
those who have no children or have more wealth than they 
wish them to have, and so give to others or accept a kind 
of foster parenthood toward the sons of others. Young, elite 
43 



658 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

aspirants for wealth have a prodigious appetite for what these 
men could tell, and would listen to them as to no others. To 
feed them with this wisdom of experience would be the cul- 
mination of the higher parenthood and give the quickening 
touch between old and young, between • the frontier and the 
acolyte, and it is precisely this that our country now so dan- 
gerously and unprecedentedly lacks, as I have shown else- 
where. Should not retirement from business, along with its 
exemptions and immunities, bring some new duties? Should 
not the reminiscent instincts of age be indulged by making 
accessible, at least in dictated autobiographies, even though 
they be reserved from publication for a century, the calm and 
final review and self-critique of these most characteristically 
American lives ? Is this not a part of the art of large giving, 
and why should the world lose with their death such addi- 
tions as this would make to its stock of experience? Teach- 
ing is surely a sacred duty of all those who have wisdom that 
the world wants, and why should what they know die with 
them when it is sO' craved? 

Wanting this, every local teacher of commercial education 
should enlist every business man of ability and public spirit 
in the community to talk to students on the lights and shad- 
ows of his own trade. Here lies a great storehouse of true 
and hard-won knowledge that has often cost a lifetime of 
labor and involved as much intellectual work as the original 
researches and discoveries of science. And why should each 
generation begin at the beginning or be taught by the method 
of hints or random giving of points when each ought to im- 
prove the race by consecrating to it all that is best in it? If 
experts, or even corner-makers in wool, cotton, pork, lumber, 
leather, wheat, corn, railroad and other stocks and bonds, 
would talk and answer questions teachers could put them for 
the benefit of their pupils, a current of vital interest would pass 
between them. If every method and device that succeeds is 
bound up in secrecy, then pedagogy in this field may well 
despair. We teachers acquire a passion for knowledge all 
men do not have and for imparting the best and latest we 
know, and so it is hard for us to understand those who make 
their profits by the suppression of this teaching instinct which 
seems to us innate and inherited, integral even to the parental 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 659 

impulse and to " big-brother " and other similar movements. 
Nowhere else are so many of the teachers those who have 
tried and failed in the practice of what they teach or who 
could not succeed in their specialty if they tried. 

Again, if not this, or in addition to it, text-books, also a 
new kind, are here, too, wanting, as indeed are often those of 
any kind. How can commerce in an inland or rural high 
school or college be rightly taught except in an empty, for- 
mal way and invested with only the ghastly semblance of 
reality by the platitudinous and effete philosophy of general 
culture, which is now only the last resort and excuse of the 
devitalized attitude of the dead teacher who, in thus seeking 
to excuse, really accuses himself? Excursions, pedagogical 
journeys with a carefully prepared curriculum or itinerary of 
business houses, are indispensable, even if certain clerks have 
to be trained, paid, and set apart to show and tell. We should 
put it up to mercantile citizens who criticise the products of 
the school to let it annex them in the sense of cooperating to 
provide for half days of pedagogic visitations by relays of 
classes. Let us say to them, Be a father and teacher for a 
few hours tO' these young pupils; demonstrate, instruct, in- 
form, show them over your establishment; prepare for this 
work a little in advance to insure them the greatest profit from 
it; contribute something tO' make the school life vital and to 
rescue it from artificiality and isolation. Dismiss as hopelessly 
unfit and afraid of his work the teacher who hints that this 
sort of thing would interfere with the regular studies, for the 
best curriculum is only " a thing of shreds and patches " com- 
pared with these things. Make the commercial school peri- 
patetic, put it on wheels if only to render your own brain 
wheelless, teach the geography of where things come from 
and go to that are in your town. In English, teach the vocab- 
ulary of business terms; know the local history as made by 
business; read the news of the day as it affects sales, pur- 
chases, prices; catch every good drummer, by day or evening, 
and make him talk of the things nearest his heart for an hour 
to the class, question and send him out with a new sense of 
his usefulness; exchange local studies of your school with 
those of others elsewhere; keep in touch with the board of 
trade, the town or city officers; collect trade journals; keep 



66o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

up to date and realize that, whatever other schools may do, 
those of this type can never remain stationary. Thus these 
courses might be made less anaemic. Here we are teaching 
very poorly what as a nation we do best. We are training 
understrappers who fit and fill subordinate places and grow 
content in them and lack the power to rise. What great busi- 
ness man was ever trained in any of our commercial schools? 
In agriculture it is a crime to conceal, and a duty to impart, 
•all its latest, highest, and best knowledge to all the people. 
Nothing can be patented or even hidden. Manufacture has 
more and high finance and trusts have most esoteric wisdom 
sequestered from schools. 

Education for the Farm. — This, to be successful, must 
forever bottom on love of animals, flowers, plants, trees, fields, 
water, and nature generally. (As set forth in Chapter XII 
of my "Adolescence.") From this love arose first, and are 
still fed also science, art, literature, and religion. We are 
hearing again the call of the wild back to the land, the coun- 
try, rural life, natural and economic, as contrasted with tech- 
nical and scholastic nature study. On this sentiment rests not 
only agriculture, but forestry and all kinds of animal culture, 
bees, insects, pests, wild birds, barnyard fowl, fish, game, etc., 
all observed with the natural eye, alive and in their own 
habitat, rather than dead and studied by sections through a 
microscope. This work needs women no less than men, is 
for children and adults, the academic and the unschooled alike. 
It points to the simple life. It is to-day further along and 
better provided for by way of teachers, apparatus for prac- 
tical work, literature, texts, higher institutions than any or 
all the other lines of industrial training, and has far more 
governmental and private agencies and a stronger public sen- 
timent behind it. Here, too, we have less to learn from 
Europe and more to teach her. The town and city have long 
drawn off the best youth and maidens, and will long continue 
to do so, but rural is now beginning to assert its charms and 
claims again against urban life as never before; the country 
is coming into the city and rapid transportation is greatly 
extending suburban life and giving it new rural traits. The 
rich are leading a new hegira to the fields and recreating 
abandoned farms. New journals, books, and articles are ex- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 66i 

pressing and aiding not only the summer but the winter joys 
in the open. Our decadent rural schools are being reorgan- 
ized and educators have been taught a wholesome sense of 
dissatisfaction with the stuffy old education of books. 

On the basis of this broader movement have grown the 
now nearly 100,000 school gardens in the United States/ the 
brief history of which goes back barely ten years and seems 
a new fairy tale of pedagogy. These gardens are of all kinds, 
sizes, shapes, in all sorts of places, under every kind of con- 
trol, with few or many facilities, so that something in this 
line can be done almost everywhere. Sometimes the hard 
earth or brick or other pavement of the schoolyard is taken 
up to make room for them, soil is carted on if necessary, 
wastes are watered, marshes drained and reclaimed from wild- 
ness, vacant lots loaned, rented, or sometimes bought near by, 
or perhaps at some distance from the school, so that there is 
no longer any excuse for untilled ground near a school, the 
hygienic conditions of which are thus often improved. There 
are long lists of flowers, vines, nursery, shade, and ornamental 
shrubs, trees and hedgerows, almost every kitchen vegetable 
that will grow, often corn and grain are raised. Beets, let- 
tuce, parsnips, carrots, peas, sweet and pop corn, cabbages, 
cauliflower, pumpkins, squashes, cucumbers, melons, radishes 
and the rest are planted and tended by boys and girls who 
often spade up the ground, water plants in drought by many 
a device. There are tools, tool houses, exhibits of produce 
and prizes. The crops are perhaps taken home, used on the 
family table, given or sold to parents or the markets, ex- 
changed or bartered to those who can tend them to the end 
through the long vacation. Children are taught about several 
score of weeds, insects, pests, and how to deal with them. 
They read or are told the content of many a special leaflet 
by the government or the state agricultural college, both 

' See as good guides and finders to the voluminous literature here, first the 
work of two of my Clark colleagues, viz., C. F. Hodge, Nature Study and Life, 
Boston, Ginn & Co., 1902. 514 p. And R. J. Jewell, Agricultural Education, U. S. 
Bureau of Education Bulletin, No. 2, 1907. 140 p. See also, H. W. Foght, The 
American Rural School, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1910. 361 p. M. L. 
Greene, Among School Gardens, Russell Sage Foundation, N. Y., Charities Pub- 
lication Committee, 1910. 388 p. H. G. Parsons, Children's Gardens for Pleas- 
ure, Health, and Education, N. Y., Sturgis & Walton Co., 1910. 226 p. 



662 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

of which are now doing so much for children. They are 
given seeds in great profusion, or sold them in penny pack- 
ages, with printed directions. Very many kinds of flowers 
are raised and taken home, sold, worn, used to decorate the 
schoolroom, sent to hospitals or invalids, funerals, etc. The 
children profit by many a lesson on the botany of roots, chem- 
istry of moisture and air, fertilization, all with the aid of spe- 
cial texts, books, and charts. They work out the elementary 
geometry of plotting their individual and also their common 
beds; they study the arithmetic of cost and profit; often 
come early or stay after school to work, spend some of their 
time through recess. Elsewhere, a good part of two or even 
three afternoons a week of school time is given them to 
keep up their plot. Some persist into and a few even through 
the summer. Children are sometimes marked for neatness, 
system, productivity, are taught the care and use of tools, how 
to plant. Interest often spreads to the home and to the win- 
dow pots, and flowers in the front and vegetables in the back 
yard are often cultivated, while farm boys bring home not 
only interest but often valuable information that the father 
applies to his profit. In 1900 Dr. Robertson distributed $100 
in prizes for the best heads of oat and wheat from the father's 
farm. This promised so well that Sir W. C. McDonald 
offered $10,000 in small prizes for three years, open to all 
Canada. While some 1,500 boys began, 450 completed the 
competition at the end of three years. Each must hand-pick 
enough of the best heads to seed a quarter of an acre. As a 
result of this three years' work, the average increase in spring 
wheat was found to be eighteen per cent on the number of 
grains and twenty-eight per cent in weight, while with the 
oats the increase was nineteen per cent in the number of grains 
and twenty-eight per cent in weight. This showed what the 
school could do. Then came the famous McDonald School 
at Guelph, for the training of teachers in this department was 
really half of the whole problem. 

The principle that every rural school should have a gar- 
den, so that there shall be a continuous chain of them over 
the country, now seems likely to be literally realized. Gardens 
keep children in school longer than they would otherwise stay, 
give a wholesome union of motor and intellectual training 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 663 

by wedding the hand and the head, strengthen the body, im- 
prove the health by exercise out of doors, make headway 
against tuberculosis, establish a new and vital bond between 
the home and the school, make farm life attractive, interest 
boys in the agricultural college and spur some to enter it. 
They have increased tenfold the number of home gardens 
(Cleveland had 50,000 due to the school), given new life to 
the school in cities that were a little in danger of falling be- 
hind (like Philadelphia, one of the leaders in this movement. 
New York being well in the rear of it). They have called 
into life many local and some large auxiliary associations and 
societies. These gardens are sometimes made social centers. 
They certainly tend to keep the child off the street and from 
idle and vicious associates. They cooperate with the parks, 
playgrounds, village improvement clubs, boards of health, and 
sometimes boards of trade. They enlist janitors. Some of 
them employ expensive experts. They bring a spirit of rivalry, 
prompt exchanges with other schools, sometimes give interest 
in landscape gardening and forestry, in soil fertility, and dis- 
tinctly help agriculture, the oldest of the arts and the newest 
of the sciences. They motivate excursions, make for docil- 
ity, order, system, perseverance, punctuality, put life into ele- 
mentary mathematics, furnish material for compositions, touch 
up geography, give zest to elementary botany and zoology, 
find moral lessons in weeds as enemies, influence reading, are 
full of silent values for citizenship, prompt charity to the poor, 
the sick, cripples ; teach color schemes and strengthen the 
aesthetic sense, widen the vocabulary, connect with and enlarge 
domestic life, give a wholesome sense of ownership, provoke 
the young to win and the old to give prizes, teach habits of 
regular and sustained industry, make troublesome boys tract- 
able, exclude baser thoughts, qualify and incline the young 
to later care better for children for having learned to care 
for plants. They relieve the drudgery of class work, make 
the mind grow with the plants. They inspire vocational pur- 
pose, interest in industrial history, teach respect for property, 
vitalize Arbor Day, are closely associated with patriotism and 
the flag, give a little spending money, teach kindness to ani- 
mals, are particularly beneficent for young and criminals, are 
religious because they point the way from nature to its Au- 



664 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

thor. Thus, in fine, they help us nearer to God and to the 
almighty dollar. 

All these claims and more are now made. I doubt if any 
educational movement in history has ever spread so rapidly 
and with such enthusiasm or if so much was ever claimed for 
anything else ever taught. Garden is indeed a mystic word, 
suggestive of paradise, beauty, and joy. The pleasure with 
which we contemplate this has its roots doubtless deep down 
in the psychogenetic strata which represent the dawn of do- 
mestication and cibicultural life. The pulse of springtide 
throbs through all this pedagogic renaissance. After the city 
interlude of only a few generations, the heart of man reverts 
to the great All-mother, Nature. The soil smells good again 
after the school smells, and we feel the benediction of the 
broad fields and blue sky sinking into our very souls. Child- 
hood, especially, belongs out of doors and in the country, has 
been led captive and is now beginning to come home from 
its captivity. The spirit of life, especially in the spring and 
summer, draws us all into the open to rest and regenerate 
our frayed and shopworn souls. This movement preludes a 
general jail delivery of the child too long imprisoned in class- 
rooms. It is high time that we thought of it. The garden 
is the lungs of the school, is a boon to the health of teachers, 
throws the strain from the nervous system and the tiny acces- 
sory muscles that make for accuracy to the larger, older fun- 
damental muscles of the back, thighs, and shoulders that dig, 
pick, shovel, rake, and lift ; teaches the significance of rain, 
heat, cold, the winter, sunshine, the meaning of leaves, grass, 
and blossoms in nature and in art for ornament; lifts the 
burden of examinations by shifting the stress from knowing 
to doing, from methods to products. 

A weak point in all this is the eight to twelve weeks' vaca- 
tion. Many, if not most, of these youthful gardeners never 
gather or even see the fruit of their labors. Some, of course, 
are in at the harvesting, but many sell, give, or barter the 
fruit of their labors or desert before it comes. Some work 
on a while at irregular intervals, but we have no statistics as 
to the number of harvesters, for the movement is now at the 
stage when all praise and none criticise. I do not find any 
suggestion that the school should hold over during the hot 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 665 

months and allow the farmers' natural vacation in the winter. 
During most of the school year gardening is impossible in the 
North, and I have seen many of them in a pitiful state in 
dog days. True, children can study books and theory and 
read when the world is snowbound, but to begin and not 
finish is not the ideal of education. Some fruit rots, some is 
stolen, some cared for by new recruits who did not sow or 
plant, and hothouses or winter gardens are a poor substitute. 
To cultivate only plants that mature in June would greatly 
limit the range of crops. 

Again, garden work is for most children a halfway sta- 
tion between study and play, so that while in term time the 
alternative between it and the schoolroom gives them a delect- 
able opportunity to escape its confinement, when the term 
closes and the option is between gardening and the freedom 
of vacation, the case is very different. Few children ever did 
or will prefer work to play. Again, novelty has its own 
charms, and these soon wear off and we hear many a tale of 
loss of zest after the tending, which is needful, becomes an old 
story and the necessity of keeping at it is fully felt. Once 
more, farmers' children often feel it irksome because they 
have had similar duties at home and do not care for a second 
apprenticeship. Moreover, there are some children who are 
really too delicate to keep their beds without help, and the 
system usually requires plots of equal size for boys and girls 
alike of the same grade, making no distinction between the 
weak and those strong enough to tend half a dozen beds. 
Thus, there are difficulties yet to be obviated and problems 
yet to be solved. 

Despite the extraordinary development of agricultural edu- 
cation in the grammar grades below and its no less remark- 
able equipment in academic grades above, American high 
schools, as usual the strongholds of conservatism, have done 
little, and here, too, are the last to respond to the spirit of 
the age, although there are, of course, exceptions. A dozen 
state agricultural colleges maintain secondary schools and 
there are some for colored and Indian children. Several state 
legislatures have provided for such schools or courses and 
there are a number of private secondary schools where it is 
taught. Several hundred public high schools in the country 



666 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

offer longer or shorter, inadequate and ineffective courses. 
Agricultural education always and everywhere tends to the con- 
solidation of rural elementary schools and cannot be worked 
well when they remain isolated. Some state universities, 
notably Illinois, welcome young men of secondary or no grade 
to any or all of their scores of courses in this department. 
All rural high schools should at least stress the science on 
which agriculture depends, although few do so. Especially 
in the East, most of the smaller, weaker high schools which 
are rural spend most of their teaching force in fitting a very 
small remnant of their pupils for college. Moreover, com- 
petent teachers in these lines are as yet few, for the agricul- 
tural colleges have not yet trained them aright or in sufficient 
numbers. The chief obstacle here is, however, the inveterate 
prejudice and repugnance of teachers and the indifference and 
dislike of the soil by secondary pupils. Thus, the gardening 
enthusiasm of the grades instead of being developed is chilled 
as soon as the pupils approach the high school and must re- 
main in cold storage till the next stage of training, if that 
ever comes. This means that the intellectual crop sown is too 
often unharvested. The American schoolboy is very sensitive 
to the stages above him at every step in his educational prog- 
ress whether he is ever to pass on or not. Just as the college 
spirit works downward and pervades the high school, so does 
that of the latter pervade the grammar grades, so that the 
seventh and eighth, to say nothing of the sixth, begin some- 
times to look upon gardening as a badge of their elementary 
grade and as something they will and want soon to outgrow 
and leave behind. There are also few or no suitable second- 
ary text-books, and here we may well hold the academic biol- 
ogist responsible for neglect or lack of insight. This is in 
sharp contrast with professors of classics, mathematics, and 
literature, who flood the mart for fitting schools with their 
texts. Applied biology should now play a tremendous role 
in the lives of all men and women calling themselves educated. 
But the secondary text-books that exist are so scholastic that 
the lessons of this great science are for the most part un- 
taught, and entrance to what is given is barred to the laity 
who have not mastered the barbaric tongue of scientific ter- 
minology and painstaking laboratory technic. Is there any- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 667 

thing that boys and girls in the four best teens more need to 
know than the practical lessons of biology, and is there any 
subject in the curriculum so unpedagogically taught? 

Europe has had some of the same difficulties, France having 
done best on account of the subdivision of land and one adult in 
four there being a proprietor, while England has done least because 
primogeniture keeps so much of the land in so few hands. France 
has three excellent secondary schools of agriculture, each with a 
large teaching staff and a two years' course, including the culture 
of sheep, silkworm, wine, distilling and brewing, tending cattle, 
poultry, bees, etc. Students must all spend their vacation on listed 
or accepted farms and report, and must also make frequent excur- 
sions through the neighborhood. Holland has permanent winter 
schools. Germany has one in nearly every province, the grade of 
Ober-Tertia giving the pupils partial exemption from military serv- 
ice, which gives a great, if artificial, stimulus to these courses 
which we should call somewhat too scientific and theoretical. Red- 
die's Abbotsholme School in England insists on some practical farm 
work and instruction for all boys, but the movement has been 
bitterly opposed by the leaders of secondary education there. 

It should not be forgotten that this is the age when the 
average boy, and still more the girl, is most averse to farm 
and even to country life. The social instincts are strong, and 
so is the love of excitement and getting together in groups, 
and these all incline to the town and city and away from the 
field and its isolation. The boy may not regard the farmer 
as a yokel or hayseed from way back, but his work and ways 
do not charm, while if the boy lives on a farm, he strains his 
tether most at this age to get away from it. Hence, if he 
enters agricultural courses connected with academic institu- 
tions, he finds himself socially discounted by his schoolmates, 
although real progress is being made in overcoming these 
tendencies, which will decline as these courses become thor- 
ough. Perhaps, indeed, the high-school hiatus with its period 
of circumnutation is necessary here where it may be that only 
after a period of aversion and orientation, when serious pur- 
pose is matured, will the boy be ready to settle to a plan of 
rural life. If so, a most beneficent step is taken by those col- 
leges who admit lads of all ages, without entrance tests to 
their courses, to a rich and varied dietary of short and long, 
special and general courses. They often give secondary edu- 



668 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

cation in agriculture to boys of college age, or even older, 
whether they have been to high school or graduated in other 
courses there, ignoring these. 

It is doubtful if the future historian of education will 
find more brilliant pages than those describing the devel- 
opment of agricultural education in college and university 
grades in this country, with which nothing- else in the world 
has anything to compare. It began, as all know, with the 
Morrill Bill of 1862 appropriating 30,000 acres of land for 
each member of Congress to establish colleges of " agricul- 
tural and mechanic arts," each state thus receiving all the way 
from 82,314 acres (Kansas) to 989,920 acres (New York). 
This represented a wide feeling that the old classical colleges 
were unsatisfactory. There was also a sentiment abroad at 
that time in the country that the applications of science, espe- 
cially those of chemistry so brilliantly and lately made by 
Liebig, would prove of the utmost economic value, so that 
hope and expectation were perhaps somewhat excessive. Great 
railroad grants were being made by the Government and wide 
tracts were homesteaded or thrown open. Unfortunately, 
many of the states sold their educational land and the colleges 
they established were for the most part poor and mean. Some 
states, however, notably Michigan and New York, kept their 
land and profited greatly by their foresight. Over 1,000,000 
acres of this land are still unsold and the sales altogether real- 
ized about $12,000,000. Little good work, however, was done 
in this field for twenty-five years, for often only agricultural 
departments were added to existing institutions. After many 
local beginnings, however, came the Hatch Bill in 1887, which 
gave each state $15,000 for an agricultural experiment sta- 
tion. Then came the second Morrill Bill of 1906. These, 
with their cumulative method and aided by later acts, have 
raised the total, so that in 191 1, when the full benefits of all 
this legislation are operative, each state and territory will 
receive $80,000 per year from the Federal Government for 
agricultural colleges and experiment stations. Of these there 
are now sixty-three, fifteen states having separate institutions 
for white and colored students. The states, too, are now vot- 
ing generous additional sums, largely for buildings and equip- 
ments. There is a National Association of these colleges 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 669 

which aims to make them equal in rank and entrance condi- 
tions to other first-class colleges, so that the bachelor's degree 
in the former shall have the same value as it has in the latter. 
Six of these institutions conduct secondary schools. They 
also hold long and short, summer, winter, correspondence, 
extension, and normal courses and conduct farmers' institutes 
all over the state. Some courses last only a week or ten days 
and admit boys. They teach forestry, dairying, stock judg- 
ing, manuring, entomology, birds, foddering, poultry, grasses, 
floriculture, etc. No discovery in these stations can be pat- 
ented, but all must be given out. Even the Babcock machine, 
used the world over and saving millions of dollars, profited 
the inventor nothing. (See Jewell.) Forty of these colleges 
offer graduate courses leading to the degree of A.M., and 
nine grant the Ph.D. Ohio opened a graduate summer school 
in 1902 with seventy-five students, but lacked funds to con- 
tinue. In several states special organizations have been de- 
vised to spread at once to the farthest hamlet the discoveries 
made at the stations, where themes of immediate practical 
value have precedence over all others. More than a million 
farmers attend the institutes yearly held by the Federal Gov- 
/ ernment. Several of these colleges have reading courses for 
farmers, and even for their wives, and ask and answer ques- 
tions by mail. Since 1904, trains are sent out all over certain 
railroad systems, stopping at hundreds of stations, preaching, 
e. g., " the corn and grain gospel," distributing seed corn, of 
which formerly only some sixty-three per cent ripened. All 
this is free and has brought returns of inestimable value. 
Leaflets and bulletins are sent out by many state colleges and 
millions of them by the Agricultural Department at Wash- 
ington. Some colleges guide the work of elementary schools 
and conduct summer courses for these teachers. Thus, the 
contact between the pioneers of the frontier engaged in re- 
search and those who can profit by the results of their labor 
is close, immediate, vital. This brings into the foreground 
a new ideal which well comports with the American spirit 
and is far-reaching and pervasive, if subtle, in its influence 
upon our educational ideals. 

Agricultural education is a great advantage in that it 
is recapitulatory. Every civilization was " dug out of the 



670 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

ground " and man has been a farmer ever since he began to 
domesticate plants or animals. To go back to old phyletic 
traits is always a joy and an inspiration. Perhaps the very 
best of this work is that it often makes the old fairly yearn 
with the wish that they might be young again and begin over. 
Children here, too, often teach the teacher, to the great gain 
of both. Again, the practical products of scientific agricul- 
ture are immense. We have copious statistics in this line. 
By the best methods and more intensive farming the output 
of many products could be doubled and some of them easily 
quadrupled. Despite all this provision, knowledge does sift 
down rather slowly from the laboratory to the laborer, who 
still often has to be taught his own interests by agencies that 
force useful knowledge upon him. The social status of farm- 
ing has been greatly elevated by this educational movement, 
and a back track from the city to the coimtry may help solve 
the gravest of all the farmers' problems, viz., that of sufficient 
labor. The gardeners of Germany have lately protested that 
their art as now taught in the schools is making so many 
people, rich and poor, sick and well, make gardens that their 
markets are impaired. The negro problem throughout the 
Black Belt, where trade unions exclude colored workmen and 
where the latter have lost the rice industry and are the victims 
of many sharpers, is solvable only by an agricultural educa- 
tion that shall make them independent on their own farmlets. 
Indeed, our political institutions were devised for yeomen in 
small communities or, in a word, for intelligent farmers of 
the colonial type who learned self-government in the town 
meeting. Many of our political and social evils, the cancer 
of corruption and graft, are mainly due to urbanization, which 
made conditions which the framers of our institutions never 
contemplated, and could be checked only by a " rural reflux." 
We are now striving to reproduce, though on a higher plane 
and better informed with science, the old farm life which I 
knew as a boy,^ and which made perhaps the best educational 
environment ever devised for adolescent lads. The danger of 
alienation from the farm by collegiate agricultural study is 

1 Hall, G. Stanley: Boy Life in a Massachusetts Town Forty Years Ago. Ped. 
Sem., June, 1906, v. 13. p. 192-207. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 671 

ever present and is subtle. It just now inclines many youth 
not especially fit by intellectual gifts or by training for it to 
seek a career in experiment stations, or makes them traveling 
salesmen of tools and labor-saving devices, or quasi-experts 
who would really have done better on the land. So inveterate 
is the prejudice that withholds a man with an academic degree 
from stated labor with his hands, that far too large a propor- 
tion of those who once enter an agricultural college do in 
fact bid a final farewell to the old place. We lack too greatly 
comprehensive statistics showing just what becomes of these 
bachelors in agriculture. The call for teachers does something 
to deplete the farm. Again, we must know the effects of the 
new agriculture, if any, upon the size of families and the gen- 
eral increase of the farming population. Dearth of workmen 
is to a considerable extent dearth of children of farmers. The 
city is, of course, the great sterilizer. So was the old New 
England farm. Shall we improve and increase the human 
stock here as we do cattle? This is the ultimate question by 
which the final value of everything is to be tested. Does 
every nation need a stratum of its population that shall gravi- 
tate toward static peasant conditions, and is this rather 
constant and intensive cultivation of the farmers' brain 
cutting off our source of supply of men and women from 
the future and helping toward race suicide in just the class 
from which in the past so many of our greatest leaders have 
sprung? 

Here we must note another defect of agricultural schools. 
They give most of their education to field culture and too 
little to animal culture. Flocks, herds, poultry are, of course, 
studied in a practical way, but this work should receive every 
attention. Breeds of every kind of animals, the effects of 
crossing and care and pedigrees, have been relatively neglected, 
as corn was ten years ago, although the same attention would 
yield a no less manifold gain. The winter neglect of cattle 
on Western farms alone brings enormous losses, while fod- 
dering and fattening and yet more attention to the breeding 
of all domestic species would not only pay, but the serious 
study of all the essential aspects of animal culture would 
not fail to bring home some practical lesson for human 
eugenics. 



672 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

We need, e. g., a good book each on the horse, cow, hog, sheep, 
and all the rest of a kind not unlike the Walter Page Series of 
Undomesticated Animals published during the last decade.^ Still 
none of these are quite right. The horse book, e. g., should be 
copiously illustrated, and should tell in plain language the paleon- 
tological history of the horse, which is a classic paradigm of evolu- 
tion because better known all the way than any other from the 
rabbit-sized eohippus up, which should describe what is known of 
the domestication of the horse, characterize its relations to different 
races, like the Arabs and Patagonians who live on and with it, its 
habits and training from the ancient mediaeval knights among whom 
horse education perhaps reached its apex ; should have something 
about equine culture history, the myths about the horse and its 
place in fable, with a touch, but not too much, of the Black Beauty 
kindness; should describe horse stock farms, care and training; 
should show distribution with maps and statistics of population, race,- 
plow, war horses, directions how to make horse farming profitable, 
and a good chapter epitomizing the now very interesting literature 
on the instincts or intelligence of the horse. We need on similar 
lines a dog book following all these rubrics and utilizing the peda- 
gogic suggestions contained in such studies as Bucke ; ^ also a cat 
book utilizing Browne.^ These manuals should all draw abundantly 
upon the studies in the field of comparative psychology all the 
way from those of the natural historians who follow and photograph 
animal life afield to those who experiment upon it under the con- 
trolled conditions of the laboratory, for animal behavior is a mine 
of pedagogy which education has not yet learned to utilize. Here 
let me add parenthetically how much the world, too, needs a good 
monkey book, and lion, tiger, bear, wolf, fox book, etc. The spirit 
of these books should be that of S. C. Schmucker.* Nothing can 
exceed the charm of such books, if only adapted to children's inter- 
ests. Although we have several texts in economic zoology,^ none 
has yet been written that fits the nature and needs of children and 

^ See Ditmars, R. L.: The Reptile Book, 1907. 472 p. Dickerson, M. C: 
The Frog Book, 1906. 300 cuts, 253 p. Jordan, D. S., and B. W. Evermann: 
American Food and Game Fishes, 1902. 400 cuts, 573 p. Holland, J. W.: The 
Moth Book, 1903. 479 p. Howard, L. O. : The Insect Book, 1902. 429 p. 
Holland, W. J.: The Butterfly Book, 1902. 382 p. Sutherland, H.: Book of 
Bugs, 1902. 223 p. Blanchan, N. : Bird Neighbors, 1897. 234 p. 

2 Bucke, W. Fowler: Cyno-psychoses; Children's Thoughts, Reactions, and 
Feelings Toward Pet Dogs. Fed. Sem., Dec, 1903, v. 10, pp. 459-513. 

3 Browne, Charles E., and Hall, G. S.: The Cat and the Child. Fed. Sem., 
March, 1904, v. 11, pp. 3-29. 

^ Schmucker, S. C: The Study of Nature, Phila., Lippincott, 1909. 315 p. 
And F. C. Hodge's forthcoming Civic Biology. 

'Osborn, Herbert: Economic Zoology, New York, The Macmillan Co., 1908. 
490 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 673 

youth. In agriculture we have W. C. Edgar's " Study of a Grain 
of Wheat," which is suggestive, extending as it does from botany 
to the flour mills, wheat pits, markets, etc. 



Technical scientific biology should wait till college, for as 
now served up in high-school text-books it is the chief enemy 
of spontaneous interest in natural history. The animals and 
plants chosen should be: (a) those nearest and best known, 
(b) those of chief economic interest as touching human life 
most intimately, and (c) those whose habits and instincts are 
most significant for the child. The place of forms of life in 
a system of classification, or even in the evolutionary order, 
has little interest and violates the above pedagogic categories. 
Hence, its place should be later. We should use the house fly, 
potato bug, spider, caterpillar, ant, bee, mosquito, wasp, but- 
terfly, snail, earthworm, hookworm, gypsy and coddling moth, 
toad, frog, rat, mouse, snake, fish, woodchuck, squirrel, coon, 
etc. These are fit and proper themes. In a word, agricultural 
education should, up to college at least, keep in the closest 
touch with nature study. Thus, children often teach teachers, 
make real contributions to science if rightly directed. A girl 
of eight, e. g., found out how many slugs a pair of bobwhites 
would eat in a day, from which data her father computed 
that this species could save the country many hundred thou- 
sand dollars- annually. Children can help us discover what 
birds should be protected and kept from extermination and 
what should be outlawed. With their aid it was estimated 
that in Nebraska there were 40,000,000 pairs of birds consum- 
ing about 50,000 bushels of insects daily to feed themselves 
and their young. Nature is a complex system of exquisitely 
balanced forces, and when one species becomes ascendant 
or descendant, many if not all others, at least in its vicinity, 
are profoundly affected. Man is only one member of this 
system, and it now depends upon his hygienic acumen whether 
he will evolve into a creature vastly superior to or lapse to 
one inferior to what he now is. Whether a century hence 
the population of this land shall number one and a quarter 
billion people, as it will if the present rate of increase keeps 
up, or shall approximate a stationary condition ; whether the 
effectiveness for work, culture, morals is augmented or de- 

44 



674 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

creases is to-day for the most part a question of dynamic 
biology, for we must not forget that family and church, state 
and school have their biological bases. Can we keep down 
pests and pestilences, weeds and bacteria ? Can we teach vital 
things and not those that make life a burden to the children, 
and that it is a relief to them to forget? Our very states- 
manship from many points of view is resolving itself into 
practical biology, and this in its last analysis is chiefly signifi- 
cant as an introduction to eugenics. The best lesson we can 
learn from all this is to improve the quality of parenthood 
and substitute wherever possible vires or real men for mere 
homines or human beings, whether we can keep down the 
human weeds and vermin and advance the best stirps and 
families. 

Science must have its technic of methods, formulae, terms, 
and its representatives must always talk to each other in what 
seems to laymen jargon. It has been said that professors in 
some fields command a larger vocabulary of technical terms 
than they do of words that all can comprehend. No doubt 
there is, too, in some a burrowing tendency or ink-fish instinct 
to hide oneself in a cloud of mystifying language. But one 
test of a real teacher is the ability to strip off all these aca- 
demic vestures and stand forth as a humanist and talk in the 
tongue of the people and to them, and tell the unschooled and 
even the unlettered the best things they know and work for, 
and thus contribute something to enrich the life of the aver- 
age man. This inclination should be strong in a republic, 
where majorities and public sentiment rule. Chiefly, how- 
ever, this demand should be felt and respected in those sci- 
ences that deal with the supremely practical problems of life, 
health, reproduction, and disease. Academic biology is just 
now beginning to hear and to answer this call, and, happily, 
to its own great benefit as well as that of the public. All biol- 
ogy that does not culminate in practical anthropology or hu- 
maniculture is a scientific torso, a pedagogic abortion. Thus, 
to-day the real test of a student of biology is how much of a 
humanist he is made by his work. No science has so neg- 
lected its utilities. 

As to industrial education for girls, the chief fact that 
meets us is that, whereas every boy expects to enter some 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 675 

wage-earning vocation for life, hardly a girl in the teens 
dreams of doing so, except temporarily. Her ideal is to 
marry, sooner or later, and be supported, and, therefore, she 
cannot put her heart into a trade. Indeed, to do so suggests 
to the budding girl some degree of renunciation of future 
wifehood and spells some elimination of romance and love 
from her life. We must look into the girl's heart to fully 
understand why, although she crowds into every open door 
of occupation as never before, she so generally refuses to serve 
a long apprenticeship needful to enter the skilled crafts. By 
the end of the grammar grades about ninety-nine out of every 
hundred girls leave or have left school. Neglecting these, 
the good shepherds of higher education have focused their 
attention upon the one, as in the song of " ninety and nine " 
who were neglected for the one who strayed to high school 
or college. Those girls who take out employment tickets, 
whether they do so to help their family, to dress better, or to 
have pin money, are chiefly interested in their present wage, 
week by week. Woman has always worked and always will, 
but the capital problem is, How can we give the training need- 
ful for the better-paid industries without detriment to the 
prospects of marriage, which in fact comes to some ninety- 
three per cent of her sex in this country and which almost 
always means exemption from self-support, since in fact only 
six per cent of the married women in the country with living 
husbands are wage earners ? ^ 

Of the 23,485,559 adult women in the United States, 20.6 per cent 
were engaged in gainful occupations. There were some 16,700,000 
women over twenty-five years of age, of whom one out of eleven 

* See Statistics of Women at Work. Based upon the census of 1900.' Govern- 
ment Printing Office, Washington, 1907, p. 399. See also Devine, E. T. : Social 
Forces. New York, Charities Publication Committee, 1910. 226 p. Carlton, 
F. T.: Educational and Industrial Evolution. New York, The Macmillan Co., 
1908. 320 p. Marshall, Florence M.: Industrial Training for Women. (Na- 
tional Society for the Promotion of Industrial Education, Educ. Bull. No. 4), 
October, 1907. 59 p. Rooper, Thomas Godolphin: The Tree of Knowledge and 
the Tree of Life. In Selected Writings. London, Blackie, 1907. 293 p., pp. 156- 
163, Report of the National Conference on Industrial Training of Women and 
Girls. Held in the Council Chamber of the Guildhall, London, October 6, 1908. 
Devine, E. T.: The Economic Function of Woman. Annals of the American 
Academy of Political and Social Science. 1895. Vol. v, pp. 317-376. Brandeis, 



676 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

had been married and yet was a breadwinner. Twenty years before, 
in 1880, the women workers in the United States numbered 2,353,988. 
Now, had this number grown in proportion to the population, it 
should have been in 1900 only 3,557,689 ; but there were " recruiting 
stations labeled destitution and higher standards of comfort," while 
more women for whom work was not an absolute necessity came 
in to win economic independence. Hence, at the beginning of the 
new century the number really was 4,833,630. Twenty per cent of 
the women of sixteen years of age, 30.6 per cent between fifteen 
and twenty-seven, and 18.8 per cent above ten years of age were 
wage earners. In 1907 it was estimated that one third of the girls 
between sixteen and twenty-four were working for pay. It is un- 
fortunate that this census schedule does not distinguish employers 
from those employed, nor work done at home from that done in 
shop or factory. Various city statistics indicate that from fifty to 
seventy-nine per cent of the girls from sixteen to twenty are earn- 
ing outside the home. Besides this, many from fourteen to sixteen 
are drifting from one unskilled occupation to another. Florence 
Marshall estimates that from fifty to eighty per cent of women 
between fourteen and twenty work outside their homes for wages, 
while very many younger ones enter juvenile employments that unfit 
them for further usefulness. Hard and Dorr estimate that in the 
thirty years ending 1900, while the population of the United States 
has increased ninety-five per cent, the women workers have in- 
creased one hundred and ninety per cent, or twice as fast. Sixty- 
eight per cent of all female workers are single; between fifteen and 
twenty, thirty-two per cent work; from twenty-one to twenty-four, 
thirty per cent; from twenty-five to thirty-four, nineteen per cent, 
and the proportion thereafter declines. In 1905 there were 393,691 

Louis D., assisted by Josephine Goldmark: Women in Industry. Decision 
of the U. S. Supreme Court in Curt Muller vs. State of Oregon, Upholding the 
constitutionality of the Oregon lo-hour law for women and brief for the State of 
Oregon. Reprinted for the National Consumers' League. New York. 1907. 
122 p. Part I of the Annual Report for 1905. Industrial Education of Working 
Girls. Boston, Wright & Potter Printing Co., 1905, pp. 1-38. (The Massa- 
chusetts Bureau of Statistics and Labor.) Technical Education for Women and 
Girls at Home and Abroad. Pub. by The Women's Industrial Council, 64 p. 
Cadbury, Edward, Matheson, M. Cecile, and Shann, George: Women's Work and 
Wages. London, Unwin, 1906. 368 p. Kilbourn, Katherine R. : Money-making 
Occupations for Women. 2d ed. Washington, Neale Pub. Co., 1901. 177 p. 
The Fingerpost. A guide to professions for educated women, with information 
as to necessary training. Pub. by the Central Bureau for the Employment of 
Women. 1906. 244 p. Richardson, Anna Steese: The Girl who Earns Her 
Own Living. New York, Dodge, 1909. 283 p. Willett, Mabel Hurd: The Em- 
ployment of Women in the Clothing Trade. Columbia University Thesis, N. Y., 
1902. 206 p. Industrial Education of Working Girls. Mass. Bureau Statistics of 
Labor. 1905. Talbot, Marion: The Education of Women. Univ. of Chicago 
Press, 1910. 255 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 677 

working women in Massachusetts, who worked on the average about 
seven years. A Boston trade school circular estimates 12,000 girls 
from fourteen to sixteen working in that state. The middle-class 
woman has new ideals to-day of commercial independence. Marriage 
and fecundity are in general inversely as opportunity for employ- 
ment outside the home, the integrity of which is now so threatened. 
This means, too, a social revolution. About one fifth of the married 
women in industry are widows, many of whom have to support 
themselves and their children. One seventh of the adult women 
of our cities are wage earners outside of the home. Single women 
of American parentage contribute less to the family income than 
do those of foreign-born parents. Of the total number of women 
employed, eighty-five per cent are single and forty-four per cent are 
between sixteen and twenty-four. The large proportion of these 
were, as girls, quite too poor to indulge in the luxury of industrial 
education. 

Of the 303 industries noted in our census, women are employed 
in 295, or all but 8, although the majority of them are found in 
less than a dozen. Men are found in every feminine occupation. 
There are, for instance, 4,800 men " seamstresses." Most of the 
great industries and nearly all of those in which women are found 
are subdivided, often minutely, and where this is done women are 
found in the unskilled lines. In the factories they are packers, 
sorters, etc. ; in the mills they are doffers and spinners. In making 
shoes and gloves they stitch, glue, sew on buttons, but are rarely last- 
ers, cutters, designers, or drawers-in. Even where food products and 
confectionery are made, they are very rarely more than semiskilled. 
The effects of untrained women upon, e. g., dressmaking means 
deterioration of the product.^ Our stores are flooded with garments, 
poorly made and designed and tasteless. Very many of our models 
come from abroad. We doubtless have talent, but no apparatus for 
discovering it. This means constant shifting and breaking-in new 
workers and waste. Girls do not know where they will be six months 
hence, but they want their five or six dollars a week now. Some 
firms lose one quarter of their girls every year and employ two 
teachers to break in new ones. A few employ men at a larger 
wage because they will stay. 

Thus, although we obscure or almost seek to obliterate 
sex distinctions in the school, they almost smite our boys and 
girls in the face the moment they emerge to enter industrial 
life. The mere fact that both sexes are found in nearly all 
callings is utterly misleading, and instead of suggesting equal- 
ity, teaches progressive differentiation of departments, kinds of 

1 Marshall, Florence M. : Industrial Training of Women. Annals of the Am. 
Acad. Pol. Sci., January, 1909. Vol. ss> PP- 119-26. 



678 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

work, ways of doing it, degrees of efficiency, and these diver- 
sities are increasing. In factories, men are more and more 
employed in one process and women in another, and this in- 
creases with the progressive and now, from the standpoint of 
humaniculture, intolerable subdivision of labor. Thus it is an 
error, although a very common one, to infer that men and 
women in a given industry are doing the same things in the 
same way. Nevertheless, we are making real progress, though 
in a slow and blundering way, toward an economic condition 
where men and women will each be found doing just the 
things they can do best. In an interesting symposium ^ it is 
stated that the reason why women have followed their own 
industries from the home into the shop is in the increased cost 
of living. This doubtless does interfere with marriage and 
contributes something, unconfessed and unconscious though it 
be, to increased aversion to wifehood and motherhood, espe- 
cially now when to many of the very best young women wed- 
lock is a realm full of doubts and fears. They have only too 
much reason as they look about to falter before making the 
experiment. Their entrance upon industry has individualized 
them. " The time is past when she can be made to sink what 
she regards as her own personal interest in that of the race." 
" One of the chief dangers to which unmarried women who 
are not overworked are exposed is the tendency to become 
eccentric, wdiimsical, casuistic, or cranky, and a single woman 
of forty or over who has kept her ideas and sense of propor- 
tion is a vastly superior, if a very rare, person." The woman 
in business, even if she does lose a trifle of the old charm 
and innocency and seem a little mannish to conservative men, 
is probably less likely to go wrong than her idle sisters. 
Woman is man's superior in her own sphere, but is not his 
equal in his. In industry she can escape chaperonage, which 
the American girl hates. She also often escapes the hum- 
drum of home and domestic duties, but her health is jeopard- 
ized more by the pace than the load and the lack of wholesome 
recreation, for it is not hard work but excitement that is to 
be feared. Servant girls, nurses, teachers can keep pretty 

* The Place of Women in the Modern Business World as affecting Home Life, 
the Marital Relation, Health, Morality, the Future of the Race. Bulletin of 
American Academy of Medicine, October, 1908. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 679 

well and do much work, but we are now developing- unique 
types in shop, telephone, and other classes of girl employees 
who rarely lay up money and who want both men's and wom- 
en's rights and to escape the duties of both. 

The industrial field is always changing. Since 1870 men telegra- 
phers have increased six-, but women twenty-fold. Nearly all suc- 
cessful business women rise from the ranks, and have started with 
not more than six dollars a week. The college girl, like the boy, 
needs to begin at the bottom. We can only snapshot the present 
moment, so rapid are the changes. Servants and waitresses, in the 
thirty years ending 1900, increased less than six per cent, while 
boarding- and lodginghouse keepers increased 742 per cent. Women 
in professional services in these thirty years increased from 92,000 
to 430,000; in transportation from 20,000 to 503,000. Girls are 
especially prone to pick up odd jobs where they can learn speed 
quickly, like warping braid, sorting silk, tying fringe, taking out 
and putting in buttons in a laundry, dipping candy, and assorting 
things. Moreover, expert work is almost always in the hands of 
men and is protected by their unions, from which women are ex- 
cluded and have very few of their own. Girls lack serious attitudes 
in their work, hate responsibility, can adjust to cheap modes of living, 
and can do very monotonous work. The latter brings apathy and 
tends to carelessness of moral and physical standards, and as a reac- 
tion impels her to seek amusements and excitements evenings, even 
though it be dear. She does not realize that in fact matrimony is 
better paid and probably, on the whole, easier than any other voca- 
tion open to woman, and that it would be better paid yet were it 
recognized as a business and carefully learned and studied like that 
of a nurse. ^ 

Girls used to be indentured, apprenticed, or bound out like boys 
till eighteen or twenty-one, or till marriage. In these old colonial 
days it was often specified that such girls should be taught to read. 
A servant who could spin or weave earned more. At the beginning 
of the last century many women not only made wines or preserves or 
kept shop, but knit, spun, wove, and perhaps sold their products. 
In many places work was put out to them, supplies being given and 
products taken back, especially weaving, spinning, and palm-leaf 
hat braiding, pay being sometimes given in goods from the store. 
Lace was made in this fashion; so were woolen cards, teeth being 
set by hand. Much factory work was thus " given out." In the 
eighteenth century many women were compositors, both of books 
and newspapers. The greatest depression in cotton, woolen, silk, 
and boots was in 1870, and it was then that the percentage of women 

' See in Everybody's Magazine a series of articles, "The Woman's Invasion," 
November, 1908, to April, 1909. 



68o EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

employed was the largest. In the early days of the factory system 
there was no prejudice against women, and no social problem. In 
colonial days the courts required that every woman should keep 
employed. When Harriet Martineau visited this country in 1836, 
she found women in seven chief occupations, though they were 
employed more or less in nearly a hundred, the shoe industry being 
a close second to cotton mills. But even then the working women 
were unorganized, exploited, and lived in ways known only to the 
poor. Miss Abbot ^ says that in the early days of the cotton mills 
women at first did what had originally been girls' work, but for 
the last three quarters of a century operatives here have increased 
less than the rate of population. It is difficult to find all the reasons 
for this slow but sure pressure. One was a new machine for yarn 
spinning, the slasher, in 1866, which made more men needful. From 
1825 to 1850, in Lowell, the city of spindles, Lucy Larcom and 
many bright Yankee girls worked and published the Lowell Offering. 
This life was a rather select industrial school for girls, who went 
from the farms and returned with money, better dresses, manners, 
and more intelligence. They were obliged to attend church, pay a 
small fee, retired at a certain time, could not walk beyond bounds, 
food was prescribed, and to all this and to the company stores the 
girls submitted. They often paid ofif home mortgages, listened to 
lectures by Emerson, Adams, and Everett. There were improvement 
circles, loan libraries, missionary and debating clubs. Girls were 
discharged for reading the Bible in the mills. At one time there 
were 150 who had been teachers; most were between sixteen and 
twenty-five. The death rate was low, and it was a badge of respect 
to have worked here. Now only eight per cent of the operatives 
are of native parentage. In the cotton mills of the country in 
1850 there were two women to every man; in 1900 there were more 
men than women. 

In Everybody's Magazine for January, 1909, it is shown how 
social distinctions have driven " Maggie " from the factory to be- 
come " Miss " in the department store at a sacrifice of from three 
to five dollars a week. By half past eight, in Chicago, 25,000 women 
are at work, 20,000 of them in department stores. Early in the 
morning girls who have worked all night in the telephone exchanges 
and restaurants, going home from their night shifts, meet factory 
girls who must be on duty at seven. " Salesladies " are a unique 
and rather monotonous type. A store gets for six dollars those 
who could earn ten in the shoe factory, and a worn-out glove girl 
will give up eight dollars and a half to begin in a store for five. 
These girls have much style and energy, considerable social life, 
pick out their lunch ; there may be a piano in the storeroom ; and 
more than half of them are of American parentage. A six-dollar 

1 Abbot, Edith: History of the Employment of Women in the American Cotton 
Mills. Jour, of Pol. Econ.,Nov. and Dec, 1908. Vol. 16, pp. 602-621 and 680-692. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 68i 

girl perhaps sleeps in a room with three others, at $2.75 a week 
for bed, breakfast, and dinner. She washes most of her clothes 
at the club laundry for five cents an hour, and can haunt bargain 
counters, with perhaps $1.55 a week to spare. She very likely 
reads, goes to lectures, theaters, is generally straight and pure, so 
that the department store is often a climax of this girl's social 
ambitions, although she remains here usually but a few years. 
At a pinch she can always fall back upon domestic service, " in 
which no degree of incompetence is a bar " to her employment; 

In trades with a little expertness there is often a long slack 
season, so that, as Odencrantz ^ showed, this is the chief cause of 
irregularity of employment. One quarter of 221 graduates of trade 
schools had given up their trades and taken to steadier work at 
a lower wage. About two thirds of the female operatives in New 
York work on goods that have a seasonal and irregular demand, at 
a wage of about six dollars per week. This is the case with mil- 
linery and machine straw hat making and many forms of novelty 
work. Some supplement by another industry which is in while the 
first is out of season. Girls are more readily discharged than men 
because they are less unionized. Men's unions are in general hos- 
tile to women. It is often said that every one employed leaves a 
man without a job. Still the union has always stood for the same 
wage scale, while in England it advocates twenty-five per cent less 
for women. A half-serious article calls women " the white China- 
men of the industrial world." " She wears a coiled-up queue, and 
wherever she goes she cheapens the worth of labor." In one case 
a strong girl operating heavy machinery in a hardware factory 
superseded her father at half his pay, and doing twice the work he 
did. In 1890 the wrapper-classer in cigar factories received twelve 
dollars a week, but during the following decade he was succeeded 
by women at six dollars. She is not paid at the same rate even in 
proportion to her skill or intelligence, but always approximates a 
fixed low level. In Birmingham, in a bicycle factory employing 
eighty men, sixty were discharged and ordered to send their wives 
back to take their places. A man who has spent two years in 
learning a trade cannot compete with his eighteen-year-old girl who 
spends two months in learning a job.^ 

It is tragic that married women, especially mothers, must 
leave home to work, for their influence upon children is more 

1 New York Census of Manufacturers, 1905, Bulletin 93. 

^ Fall River is the chief American cotton town, where more white women are 
working in proportion than in any other place save Lowell, another cotton town, 
and where more white babies are dying proportionately than in any other city in 
the Union save Biddeford, Maine, another cotton town. While in the United 
States at large about 21 women in every 100 are working, in Fall River it is 45 
out of 100. Between the ages of 16 and 20, 78 per cent earn in Fall River. Work 



682 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

than that of teacher and father combined. Speciahzation has 
given her a secure place, but it is too near the bottom of the 
industrial scale. Its effects upon the father, too, seem bad, 
for statistics show that more men whose wives go out to work 
drink, although we cannot yet surely distinguish cause and 
effect. A man who cannot support his family must suffer in 
self-respect. As yet we have almost no laws in any state pre- 
scribing the length of time before or after confinement when 
women must abstain from outside work. Again, all medical 
authorities agree that one of the prime hygienic needs of 
woman is a period of monthly rest, and this no industry per- 
mits. In the old home occupations she could regulate her 
work, but not under modern conditions. This cannot fail to 
cause subtle and progressive deterioration. Never in all her 
history has she been so situated that she had no control over 
her health and comfort in this respect. In occupations which 
require strain of nerve and brain that are unwholesome, in- 
volve hard muscular work and prolonged standing so often 
required of salesgirls, for instance, that they seem alert to 
customers, and that involve special regimen for the feet until 
they are accustomed to it, this wastage is incalculable. All 
this is particularly hard on girls in the early teens whose lunar 
regularity has not been fully established and while the devel- 

begins at 6.30 a.m. when the blazing Hghts are turned on, and one minute later 
everything is going. Every minute of the working day Fall River makes two 
miles of cotton cloth. Every Saturday afternoon the girls crowd the sidewalks 
and stores. Just now in the lower forms of mill work the Portuguese are driving 
out the French Canadians, as they did the Irish and they did Yankees. The weave- 
room girls dress with taste and look down on the spinners. Of 10,274 cotton 
workers here, the parents of only 345 were born in the United States. This means 
distance and often antagonism between capital and labor. The working week 
is now 58 hours in place of 81 as formerly. The improvements that have been 
effected are largely due to the presence of women, for when they stop working 
men must stop, so their presence here has lifted the weight of excessive toil from 
men. But the tension is increased. Instead of one loom, now from six to twenty 
may be tended by a single person, with a piercing monotonous noise that never 
slacks. The speed tenders work in rooms full of cotton dust and with tropical 
heat and moisture. The effects of this substitution of the power loom for the hand 
loom are seen in that whereas in 1900 in the registration arrears of the United 
States out of every 1,000 babies under one year of age 165 died, in Fall River it 
was 305, where the mortality was greater than in any other city except Biddeford, 
where it was 311. In Providence, less than one fourth of the deaths were of 
children under five; in Fall River it was more than one half. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 683 

opment of all the organs and functions involved in reproduc- 
tion is most rapid. 

A number of excellent general surveys of occupations open 
to women have lately been made, such as those of Miss Kil- 
bourn, Miss Richardson, and in England in the Finger Post 
by some two score authors, and the best industrial schools for 
girls aid them in at least avoiding bad and often in deciding 
on and starting in suitable trades. Women are also now rap- 
idly finding or making new positions for themselves among 
the subdivisions of labor, and sometimes creating new callings 
for their sex. As they advance in the twenties or thirties 
they often display great ingenuity and originality in devising 
novel products and kinds of service. Never was it so apparent 
to the world that there are a vast number of things in which 
women can far excel men as in the industrial phase of the 
" war of sex against sex." Woman should, of course, give 
special attention to these, and one vital part of her industrial 
training, and that at an early stage of it, should be given to 
a wide comparative view of the different callings open to her. 
The employment and vocational bureau function should be 
magnified. Naturally she does not take to specialization as 
readily or as early as man. Yet in many of the highly com- 
plex industries she finds herself doing a single small and 
monotonous thing all day that is dwarfing and destroying to 
her body and soul, for work that is automatic and does not 
occupy the mind is, as has often been pointed out, in many 
ways deteriorating. To take an extreme case, in Chicago, 
where women fix wooden handles to the metal shanks of screw- 
drivers, they must make 750 push-kicks per hour. Surely in- 
dustry should not so ill-use woman as to return her to society 
a neuter or a semi-invalid. 

In the Pittsburg stogie factories (Miss E. Butler's Pittsburg 
Survey) the girl does not make a whole stogie. She is a bunch- 
breaker, filler, or binder, or works at the suction table. Two girls 
and three machines now do what one man did before, very much 
faster and cheaper. And this involves a social change, for " woman 
has not risen to man's skill ; skill has been lowered to woman's 
level. Woman has not been masculinized ; work has been femin- 
ized." "Women enter the factories usually as adjuncts to simplified 
machines and subdivided tasks." Again, there are almost no women 
watchmakers who can put a whole watch together and make it go, 



684 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

yet women watch workers are rapidly increasing. Their speed and 
precision are remarkable. In a cardboard factory, where a box 
must be bent ten times, i,8oo are made in a nine-hour day. Woman's 
capacity for doing such things seems almost superhuman. In 1900 
41,294 women were employed on watches, forty per cent of all 
employees, but a large influx from Bohemia, the invention of ma- 
chinery, the greater docility of women, are factors.^ In most fac- 
tories speed, strain, and nervous tension increase, and this, taken 
in connection with the instability of woman's nervous system, is a 
very grievous evil. Telephone girls on duty for five hours often 
suffer from nervous debility, for this is harder than teaching. A 
physician says " after four or five years many of these girls leave 
the service and marry, but they often break down and have nervous 
children," so that the physical racial cost of woman's work is great. 
Many women workers rise very early, take wretchedly inadequate 
breakfasts, have very short hours for lunch ; if their work is seden- 
tary and monotonous, abdominal and pelvic organs are liable to lose 
their tone, the chest to grow flat, and recuperative power to abate. 
England has effected much amelioration in this kind of work by a 
system of medical examinations. After a rush period, with over- 
time work, doctors report an increase of from one third to one 
half in their patients from this class. Surely an eight-hour day is 
enough for women, and yet there are to-day many factory girls 
of sixteen working thirteen hours. 

Another curious point has arisen here. A court has de- 
clared that the law has no right to dictate to what extent the 
capacity to labor may be exercised by those who have this 
commodity to dispose of. Yet New York forbids factory 
work after nine at night for women. Should it make any 
difference if she is a willing worker? Some claim that the 
right to work when, where, and as one pleases ought to be 
as inalienable as the article that no person shall be deprived 
of life, liberty, or the pursuit of happiness without due process 
of law. Labor is property, and the right to sell it is liberty. 
In September, 1906, at Berne, fourteen nations made a con- 
certed effort to relegate women tO' their old positions as de- 
pendent state wards by abolishing most night work, and in 
1874 Massachusetts led this country in restricting the hours 
which women should work in certain industries. Seventeen 
states do this to-day, twelve forbid work in mines, five regu- 
late their handling of dangerous machinery, six the amount 

1 Butler, Elizabeth Beardsley: Women in the Trades. Pittsburg, i907-8< 
N. Y. Charities Publication Committee, 1909. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 685 

of time for their midday meal, thirty-one compel employers 
to supply seats, and twelve require decent toilet facilities. 
Shifts every three to five hours have also been enforced. This 
kind of legislation has been declared constitutional in several 
states. 

The first law of this kind here in 1844 applied to men as well 
as women. Many old abuses, at any rate, are thus being remedied, 
such as flax spinning, where women still often work with bare feet, 
with the flying whirlers spraying water upon their breasts, pro- 
tected only by a burlap waist, and where they work in great heat 
and their clothes are so steam drenched that when they put them 
on at night there is great danger of colds, as of mill fevers where 
the air is charged with dust and suction machines are not enforced. 
Sweating has been greatly abated, and yet sewing girls on piece work 
often eye the clock at every pause, and are tense if they fall behind 
their pace till they have caught up. So in sorting letters, if the 
piece rate is cut down twenty per cent one must do in four minutes 
what was done in five. The power to perform this rapid monotonous 
work at maximal speed lasts but a few years, and the fast workers 
soon lose their pace. Only the wiser ones quit racing and realize 
that whatever they make above a certain sum goes to the doctor. 
A glove speeder who turned out five dozen a day at $2.50 caused 
a cut in the wages, but it was said that the extra money was 
refunded to her for speeding up the room. 

Florence Marshall urges that work that occupies thought 
is a very precious safeguard against evil at an age when some- 
thing in life must be found that is intensely interesting and 
exercises the mental powers. Those who take up unskilled 
work with no chance of advancement and live on wretched 
wages are almost certain some time to meet the tempter, and 
perhaps to do so often. All these experiences render them 
unfit just in those qualities that make for maternity and do- 
mesticity. Subdivision of labor not only means deterioration 
of producers, but it gives " industry and the civilization that 
rests on it an unstable basis." Women now buy many things 
that they once made. On the other hand, we must not forget 
that some industries have a high intellectual and moral value, 
and W. I. Thomas thinks that man's education in general 
should be more occupational and gainful. He thinks every 
mother should be relieved of her children and they of her for 
some portion of the day. There is now a National Woman's 
Union League, under Mrs. R. Robbins, with an organizer, 



686 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Miss Fitzgerald, and Miss Agnes Nestor, the latter one of 
the most striking figures of a new type, the genuine working 
woman leader. She has worked in every glove department, 
and now drives bargains with the employers, shows them 
their interest, and they listen to her. Because women stay so 
short a time they submit to abuses, and if the latter were 
removed they would stay longer. When trades are so care- 
fully studied that they can be marked on a scale of healthful- 
ness for girls there will be a great gain. London has a sys- 
tem of municipal employment for unemployed women. There 
should be more of this, so great is the demand for domestic 
servants, but London has now three workrooms open to 
women who may be sent there by any of twenty-nine distress 
committees. The maximum period is sixteen weeks at a time; 
the market for their products is, of course, an artificial one, 
and their earnings are determined by the number of depend- 
ent children, i. e., ten shillings a week for herself, two more 
for the first child under fourteen, one shilling sixpence for 
the second, and one shilling each for the remaining children 
under that age, with a deduction of one fourth for the earn- 
ings of each child over fourteen. These women are given 
dinner, tea, carfare, and work forty-eight hours a week. The 
work is tailoring and hand knitting. It is hard to make in- 
competent old ladies from forty to sixty, some of whom are 
unhelpable and have never used a needle, really earn much. 
The few industries that find it profitable to employ girls just 
out of school pay wretched wages and get incompetent and 
unreliable help. Many of these industries need almost no 
training at all. Lrdustrial schools for girls must take great 
pains in selecting the industries for which they fit. The best 
trades for their purpose are those, as Mary S. Woolman says, 
which require expertness, employ large numbers, which are 
hard to learn in the workshop, which pay good wages, ofifer 
promotion on merit, with favorable sanitary conditions. Girls 
seem to be more sensitive to these than boys. According to 
one estimate, the very least desirable industries for women 
employ nineteen per cent of them,^ while the more desirable 

* Marshall, F. M.: Industrial Training for Women. Natl. Soc. for Promotion 
of Industrial Education. Bulletin No. 4, 1907. 59 p. 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 687 

group, such as the manufacture of cloth, clothes, shoes, hats, 
jewelry, printing and publishing, employ some sixty per cent 
of the more or less skilled. Some now advocate that women 
should be excluded from the first or lowest class. It is esti- 
mated that at least three fourths of the younger girls enter 
the more undesirable industries. Surely, if the average girl 
works for five years, we ought to do something to fit her to 
do so, and probably such training would pay from a purely 
mercantile point of view. 

The best European countries surpass us. Technical education 
for girls in France began in 1856 and the first professional school 
was opened in 1864. Both these types seek to turn out elite young 
workmen, require an entrance examination, careful study in the 
morning, and training in the afternoon. A wide variety of indus- 
tries is taught. Most girls trained in this system become either 
forewomen or teachers of their craft. There are now six municipal 
schools for the technical training of girls in Paris, which fit either 
for trade or business. The chief obstacle here comes from em- 
ployers, who do not see the advantage of developing all-around 
capacity, but want one-branch apprentices, although it is overwhelm- 
ingly proven that these do not " arrive." All depends upon the 
teachers. Girls often enter as early as twelve. Not only instruction 
is given, but there are often scholarships, midday meals, and clothes 
to those who need them. The pupil must not look to the school as 
an employment agency to help her in finding a position, but must 
trust to her own merits. When the women's societies in Germany 
established both extension classes and industrial schools, the Lctte 
Verein (Berlin, 1866) assumed control. In Baden every girl of 
fourteen who earns a living must attend a continuation school for 
three hours a week for one year, or her employer is fined. The 
schoolroom is usually fitted with a kitchen, very simply. The girls 
often go to market with the teacher, and later alone, with money and 
notebooks, and there are lessons in lighting fires, heating water, 
ready reckoning, each of the chief articles of food, with prescribed 
reading. In industrial districts where both sexes work in the field, 
they are taught in compulsory classes. So effective is the training 
that those who take it rarely find themselves in competition with 
those who have not done so, but receive a larger wage and more 
ready employment. Often in schools of commerce, as well as trade, 
all girls learn to cook and mend, perhaps make children's clothes 
out of old ones of adults. The country has fully waked up to the 
fact that money spent on girls' education is not lost. Among the 
various kinds of industrial training in London are schools intended 
to teach young wives to wash, cook, iron, make their own dresses. 
These make the very quickest and most eager pupils. There are 



688 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

often peripatetic teachers who hold classes in clubs and other insti- 
tutions on dressmaking, millinery, first aid, nursing, etc. Training 
schools for infant nurses have lately assumed great importance on 
account of the increase of infant mortality. Surely the care of 
children must be raised to the level of a profession. Even the 
Froebel-Pestalozzi House trains children's nurses. 

In this country the Boston Trade School for Girls v^as based 
on a careful local study. In 1910 more than half the girls of high 
school age in the city were earning money. Before this move- 
ment there was no opportunity for training for Boston girls. It 
was found that dressmaking, millinery, clothing, machine and straw 
operations were the best trades. A policy of the school is to train 
girls in two allied seasonal trades so that the slack period of one 
fits the busy period of another. Each pupil selects a trade which 
requires about a year. Sessions are from 8.30 a.m. to 5.30 p.m., five 
days a week. On the average there are five and a half hours' daily 
work in the school, with two hours of supplementary work at home. 
The school year begins the first week in July and receives pupils 
from fourteen to seventeen, although they may be admitted when- 
ever there are vacancies. Those who cannot afford the slight ex- 
pense are aided. The annual cost per pupil is a trifle over $100. 
It was found necessary to admit girls of fourteen without refer- 
ence to schooling and allow them to enter and withdraw at any 
time, so that girls enter from the fifth grade to the high school. 
There is overcrowding and a long waiting list. Useful things are 
made. Should such a school be self-supporting if it sells its prod- 
ucts, and should they be up to the market standard, or will this 
make the trade school a mere business venture ? On entering, each 
girl fills out a blank concerning her family. Her home is visited, 
and on this basis she is advised what trade to pick. There is a 
school record of her strong and weak points. Girls are helped to 
places and employers asked to report after two weeks. Girls from 
this school earn all the way from four to eighteen dollars per week, 
and the demand is greater than the supply. Trade school certifi- 
cates are given those who attend twelve months and average 90, 
and a record of their career is kept. There is a Pioneer Club of 
old pupils for fellowship and for extending the influence of the 
school. The Woman's Educational and Industrial Union also main- 
tains trade school shops, where those who have attended for one 
year but do not feel quite ready to enter an industry can support 
themselves by having their products sold. 

The Manhattan Trade School for Girls, in New York, opened 
in 1902, admits all the way from the fifth grade up, but with less 
study of local demands, and appealing to rather a low class of 
wage earners. Millinery is far better in Boston than in New York, 
while the reverse is true for pasting and novelty work. Dressmaking 
is more specialized in New York, while power machine work is 
best in Boston and employers take more interest in their girls, 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 689 

who are on the whole better trained, although more are foreign- 
ers and both poverty and health conditions are worse. The Man- 
hattan School is open the year round and instruction is free. In 
1907 there were 433 pupils, and the expenses for the year were 
$67,000. Most pupils remain from six months to two years. During 
the recent depression free instruction was given to girls thrown out 
of work, and in 1907 trades were taught to crippled children. Work 
is adapted to aptitudes of pupils. There is academic instruction. 
About one third take dressmaking-. Each keeps a time book to show 
how many hours are given to each dress. The Alliance Bureau 
places about half of the girls from this school. In 1907 about 
$12,000 was received from order work. There are several evening 
courses. Lunches were brought from home, but warm meals are 
also served. The school aids those in poor health. It teaches 
cooking. Some pupils are little housekeepers whose mothers are 
sick or dead. Twenty girls are chosen at a time and divided into 
two groups for six weeks' daily instruction. Each receives thirty 
lessons, which is about a year's course in cooking in the public 
schools. The relation of employer to employee is part of the course. 
There are several auxiliary associations, also a student council and 
an aid committee of representatives of social settlements, with trade 
certificates at the end and physical examinations required. 

The Hebrew Technical School for Girls examines every appli- 
cant personally, preferring orphans and half-orphans who are sup- 
posed to be grammar graduates. Ninety-five per cent of the parents 
are foreign-born. In 1909 the average daily attendance was 355 
and the average entering age 14.7. The courses are eighteen months. 
The commercial and manual cannot be taken at once. The hours 
are 8.45 to 4 and instruction is free. There is no night work, no 
vacation, but lighter work and more physical training in the hot 
months. Of former pupils, 971 earn annually $560,000 on an aver- 
age, or $48 per month each. The school is maintained by voluntary 
contribution and costs $45,000 a year. 

Dressmaking and millinery were first curriculized in this coun- 
try at the Pratt Institute. The ideal taught girls was, instead of 
having best and everyday clothes, to have all best for each pur- 
pose, for this varies the problem. All applicants must be eighteen 
and pledged to stay a year. The course was general, including the 
history of costumes, business methods, physical culture, plenty of 
draughting, cutting, talks on color, on buying, etc. Each makes a 
number of dresses for herself, and the profits of all costumes and 
sales work, less ten per cent, go to the maker. Shops must be 
visited and fine discriminations made. The widening difference 
between indoor and street gowns and modes of trimming affords 
ever greater opportunity for the display of talent. Now courses 
long and short are given in many places, so that we have here a 
rather striking instance of a strong, natural instinct turned to edu- 
cational uses. Hence it merits a little more attention. With the 
45 



690 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

dawn of the teens come with girls an intense interest and zest 
in dress, and perhaps especially in hats. Even the very few who 
go wrong to indulge in this passion for finery show how intense it 
is. Thus here is a great natural force, mainspring, or reservoir of 
psychic energy which it was up to pedagogy to utilize. This inter- 
est has been studied statistically repeatedly, and about half the 
girls at nearly this period seriously think of becoming milliners or 
dressmakers, so important does the dress problem loom up to them. 
The teacher's question is how much wholesome information this 
zest will absorb and vitalize, and how elaborate culture machinery 
it can be made to run. The pedagogue just awakened to the need 
of industrial education visits establishments, sees processes, and 
then sits down and works out a systematic, thorough, logical course 
that seems so orderly and symmetrical and gives its author such 
complacency and is launched with much labor, and perhaps expense. 
But these prospectors omit to study the most essential factor -in 
the problem, viz., the desires and interest of the girls themselves; 
and so, while such courses start well and a few persevere, most of 
those for whom it is intended and who are expected, fail to come 
or drop out by the way. The demand for a few lessons, perhaps 
a dozen or less evenings, in learning how to trim their own hats in 
the spring and fall is very great, but, as a teacher once said in my 
hearing, " These confounded girls are so frivolous and light-minded 
they won't touch our best curriculum here." It is the old and tragic 
story. The pedagogue assumes, instead of realizing that he must 
create, interest, go where it is, take it as it is, and then slowly nurse, 
evolve, cultivate, and elaborate it. It is not enough in this country 
to make courses out of what parents want for their girls, or what 
workers with them think they ought to want, but the start here, if 
it is to be successful, must be made with what the girls now 
desire. This is the raw material, crude enough, perhaps, but which 
must be developed slowly and laboriously to an ever more finished 
product. 

Admirable as the above ameliorations are and great as is 
the advance they make upon the " brain refinery " methods of, 
e. g., the stock classical high school which is so obliterative 
of personality, even the further progress so needed in the 
direction of trade schools will never solve the chief problem 
of woman's education. Wifehood is the vocation of ninety- 
three out of every hundred women in the land, and mother- 
hood also of the great majority of these. Thus, women are 
to-day taught least of all the things they most of all need to 
know, viz., home-making and child-rearing. In these mat- 
ters the average American woman to-day is ignorant and in- 
competent, and the school is doing little to improve her in 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 691 

these most vital of all respects. She is growing independent 
of and indifferent, if not averse, to wedlock, more unwilling 
to have children, less able to nurse or even to keep them alive 
the first year, if not during the first five years of life, as our 
sad and well-known statistics show. Her fiing at a trade 
makes home distasteful. She has not grafted the tree of 
knowledge on to the main branch of the tree of her life, but 
at the best only on to suckers. She does not know how to 
buy, and yet, as Devine has well shown, she largely deter- 
mines consumption and markets. Schools for the care of 
babies, now successful in various parts of Europe, the Amer- 
ican girl would avoid, and to study children, even in college 
classes of psychology, seems to her almost like " casting her 
sex in her teeth." She too often prefers to forget she is a 
woman and to exult in the glorious liberty of the sons of 
men rather than in that of the daughters of women. Statis- 
tics show that about one fifth of our girls pass through a 
period in which they seriously wish they had been born boys. 
As beaux or husbands, men do not come up to their ideals 
and do not satisfy them, and that is largely our fault, as I 
have shown in Chapter IV. Nor do they satisfy us, or there 
would be more and earlier marriages, more domestic content 
and home staying, and less divorce. Our education must 
assume that girls will marry and not that they will be single 
and self-supporting, and that wedlock, if it comes, will take 
care of itself. 

Teaching trades and teaching domesticity are two radically 
divergent things. The pedagogy of the two differs profoundly 
and in ways all of which are not yet realized. The first is 
more special, the last more general education. One gives 
skill and technic ; the other is more all-sided, varied, and evo- 
cative of the whole personality. One tends away from and 
the other toward home-making. One makes woman a com- 
petitor of man and the other gives her a field more to herself. 
One throws the stress on certain parts or functions and leaves 
others to atrophy; the other calls out more all-round and 
diversified activities that are more favorable for full physical 
development. One makes woman independent and more able 
to win her way unaided ; the other brings homey and homing 
thoughts and dispositions. This latter consideration is per- 



692 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

haps the most profound of all. Other things being equal, 
girls with more potential wifehood and motherhood in their 
souls and bodies would always choose the latter, and those 
with less would gravitate toward the former. But other 
things are not equal. A trade school is far easier to establish 
and curriculize than a school of domestic arts of equal grade, 
in creating which woman can both follow and get more aid 
from man. In the latter she must take her stand upon her 
own sex and is left more to her own resources. The one 
type of education is easier intellectualized, the other is better 
moralized. One makes woman more insistent, the other more 
consistent with her nature and history. One stresses her 
rights and the other her duties. One makes her realize the 
annoyances of children and the other predisposes her to love 
them and gives her thoughts and feelings a more homey turn, 
and so sweetens, sanifies, and broadens the emotional life. 
The danger of one education is that it will incline those who 
take it to selfishness, while the other is full of altruistic influ- 
ences. One interests her in business, the other keeps her 
nearer to the fundamental problems of life, health, reproduc- 
tion, disease. 

At present a domestic department is often dangerous, not 
to say almost fatal, to the success of an independent trade 
school for girls. Those pupils who specialize in practical home 
economics are regarded as on the lower social plane. Their 
activities suggest menial if not servant-girl work. The atti- 
tude of girls is often not unlike that of the colored race shortly 
after their emancipation, to industrial education. They felt 
that freedom meant exemption from work, and such training 
as this recalled the old state of servitude. Schooling they re- 
garded as a means of raising them above the necessity of 
physical toil. So our high-school girls fill the Latin and 
algebra classrooms, feeling that, once initiated into these sub- 
jects, they are best of all safeguarded from the dangers of 
kitchen work. Boys, too, once felt that secondary education 
afforded them the easiest way tO' escape from the farm. But, 
thanks to the new agricultural renaissance, this prejudice is 
much overcome. Only another movement of no less dimen- 
sions and force than the agricultural revival, which should be 
our paradigm and inspiration here, will ever bring about a 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 693 

similar reconstruction of girls' ideals concerning domestic 
education. 

The following are better : In the vocational school at St. Albans, 
N. Y., the girls learn practical housekeeping in the kitchen and a 
dining room, which are simply furnished, the former only with a 
plain coal and gas range, work table, sink, and dish closet, and the 
dining room with only tables, chairs, a china closet, and a simple 
table. All the tablecloths, mats, napkins, etc., are made by the 
girls, who are taught to sweep, dust, wash windows, have lessons in 
iDuilding the fire and care for the stove, sink, and tables. They 
learn to cook plain, nutritious dishes and to buy the materials they 
use, and to set and serve at table. They study nutritive values 
and expenses, wash and iron garments made in sewing classes, the 
aprons worn in school work, all towels, table mats, curtains, and 
keep a book of recipes used in cooking lessons. The sewing room 
is large and equipped with sewing machines and work tables, where 
the girls make simple garments for themselves and members of 
their families. They study cotton and woolen fabrics and are taught 
something about the different kinds of weaves, dyes, and are en- 
couraged to collect and mount samples of the different kinds of 
material they are most likely to use. Very simple principles of 
design and color for table and wall ornaments, placing of tucks, 
ruffles, embroidery for underwear and trimmings for dresses are 
taught, and candle shades and lamp shades and pillow covers are 
planned and made, and as much academic work as possible is ap- 
plied here. 

The public schools of Columbia, Ga., are unique for the industrial 
education they provide for primary grades, where girls are taught 
home economics, cooking, housecleaning, laundering, floriculture, 
yard decoration. There are four domestic science centers, one for 
white and one for black children, each with elementary and higher 
grades. Every girl, white or negro, receives from two to five years 
of training in home economics. The negro girls prepare and serve 
a meal to their minister, and the white girls to six guests. They 
also make light refreshments for mothers' meetings, etc., and help 
prepare the school Thanksgiving and Christmas dinners. The sec- 
ondary girls prepare and serve every day a school lunch, which is 
sold at cost to teachers and pupils. They also make and serve for 
visitors, of whom there are many to see this unique system. The 
secondary school is open eleven months a year, from 8 to 4, with 
a half holiday Saturday, and lasts three years. All who enter must 
be fourteen and have completed the fifth grade. Although tuition 
is free, both sexes are charged five dollars per term for books, etc. 
No foreign language is permitted, but other academic topics are 
taught. The last two months of the last year students must spend 
in practical work, if possible, and make daily reports. In the last 
graduation exercises each member demonstrated what she could do. 



694 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Cloth was woven, from it a dress was drawn, cut, fitted, made, and 
the valedictorian returned to the platform wearing it, receiving her 
diploma in that department. 

In the Oread School of Worcester, which was essentially a school 
of domestic science, with cooking as its center, taking for the most 
part high school graduates from all over the country, the commence- 
ment exercises consisted in each girl or pair of girls making a dish. 
The salutatorian, in academic gown, made soup, explaining what 
she did while doing it on the stage. Then fish was cooked and 
served, while the valedictorian made and distributed ice cream. The 
longer processes like cooking and the hiatuses were filled up by 
changing viands, and all were served after the exercises were over. 
St. George's Parish has a model tenement flat where girls of the 
East Side, New York City, learn the arts of home-making. Several 
other churches have opened cooking and other domestic classes in 
their vestries. 

College and university settlements, neighborhood houses, 
friendly aid societies, and many personal and club agencies 
besides the public and private schools teach some elements of 
home economics and household arts. Training schools for 
teachers of these subjects have lately been established at Co- 
lumbia and at the University of Wisconsin and at a few nor- 
mal schools. The intense interest often taken by girls as 
young as eight years of age in learning to cook a few plain 
dishes is very significant. They not only make themselves 
more useful at home but love the work itself. Indeed, it 
ought to have a very strong phyletic recapitulatory momentum 
comparable with that of boys for hunting, for it is probably 
as old in the history of the race. To be a good cook means 
more than memorizing a few recipes. It involves knowledge 
of almost every useful vegetable, plant, and spice, and the 
interest widens from that of the market to the very varied 
source of supplies. It involves neatness, order, system, good 
judgment, and taste in every sense of the latter word, pres- 
ence of mind, and in addition to this a certain kindly human- 
istic disposition to really benefit all those who partake. Young 
boys have often been taught to cook with pleasure and profit 
to themselves and their families. From making fudges, rare- 
bits, roasting corn afield, and clambakes, to bread-making and 
a boiled dinner is quite a distance, but all the interval is 
bridged by imperceptible gradations, although we are not yet 
quite sure of the best curriculum. But certainly the young 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 695 

cooker's appetite may itself often be turned on as a pedagogic 
motive. To eat what one has prepared ought to be a great 
pleasure, although it might be a punishment too cruel to in- 
flict. A colored woman who long cooked for me felt genuine 
pride in all I did, as if it were really her work, and if I was 
indisposed, often felt her own conscience sore, on the prin- 
ciple, " man ist was er isst." Cooking was one of the chief 
agents in achieving our civilization. Perhaps it may be called 
the first practical chemistry and be regarded as a good peda- 
gogico-genetic introduction to that science. There are dinner 
givers whose good name rests largely upon the culinary art of 
their cooks, and not a few men as well as women are proud 
of demonstrating before their guests their own proficiency in 
making some special food or concocting some special drink. 
Those classes that are set the task of, e. g., " planning and 
cooking a good dinner for seven at a cost of fifty-two cents " 
face a proposition that challenges a great variety of their best 
powers of head and hand, not to say heart. Even the art of 
making and keeping a good fire, in which I find nine lessons 
in one course, is partly a product of innate genius, and is 
only in part one of the teacherbilia. Surely, water boils more 
easily for some than for others. Not only for the sake of 
the home should all girls become adepts in cooking a modest 
repertory of plain, wholesome dishes, but for their own sake 
and use, for all young women, however employed, should have 
both the facilities and the inclination to prepare at least one or 
two of their own daily meals, if for no other reason, in order 
to keep alive the flickering flame of domesticity on the hearth 
of their hearts. They should not be allowed to forget the 
truth of the adage that the way to a man's heart is through his 
stomach. Indeed, what man could long resist a maiden who 
thus laid siege to his affections? Culture history shows that 
this was once a potent stimulus and motive to culinary accom- 
plishment, although it is now greatly in need of revival. Per- 
haps I am betraying the secret of my sex, but here is an 
ancient source of fascination that young women are neglect- 
ing to their immeasurable loss, provided they care for wife- 
hood and settled domesticity. As to conjugal and domestic 
happiness, too, good cooking would do very much to prevent 
disruptured households, would keep the man from the saloon. 



696 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

to which he often takes refuge to appease the needless crav- 
ings of his digestive apparatus, and would make boys more 
contented with home, for often a good meal served in the 
right way gives a physiological peace that passes all under- 
standing. Why, then, in none of our cooking courses for 
little housekeepers is due attention paid to the splendid social 
settings of this high art? Its mere mechanism is good and 
is much, but the reenforcement of it from the larger, higher 
reservoir of motivation that ethics, historic and cultural value 
and relations could supply is the one thing needful which is 
lacking here. Not only woman's education, but her position 
in modern life would be vastly improved by a renaissance of 
the kitchen as the center of home influences. As long as 
most women neglect and despise the work which for a major- 
ity of their sex has always been and always will be so cardinal, 
they neglect the very center of the home and of their hearts. 
Most cooking teachers, if they do not lack due respect for their 
calling, at least do not glory in it, and until they put more 
pride into their work and set it in a larger, higher, intellectual 
horizon it will not attain the position we are now seeing that it 
demands and are beginning to desire it should have. 

We need model kitchens of different grades, sizes, costs, 
with the best and simplest wood, coal, and oil stoves, sinks, 
etc. The kitchen should be well lighted, with a pleasing color 
scheme and as pleasant as the living room. Everything in 
it should be plain and arranged in the most economic step- 
saving way, with plenty of inexpensive utensils. There is no 
such educational environment for girls. It is more than 
stable, barnyard, and garden combined for the boys. Here 
even the daughters of the wealthy should be made to feel at 
home no less than in the parlor. They should be eagerly 
interested in all new devices. A well-equipped kitchen is a 
constellation of pedagogic agencies. The time is at hand, I 
believe, when there will be a kitchen in every grade school 
from which boys will not be excluded, for here they will learn 
useful things and their ideals of woman's work will undergo 
needed reconstruction. There should be cooperation with 
home kitchens and a carefully inaugurated scheme of mutual 
visitation. Spinster teachers need a new orientation and 
polarization, a more motherly attitude, to which this would 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 697 

help them. From prizes for dooryard improvement, awarded 
according to comparative rather than absolute standards, it 
would not be so great a step to prizes for home-kitchen im- 
provement. Why should not domestic teaching be first and 
chief of all, since most of the activities of most women of 
the land focus here, and why should not school influence be 
as much felt and contagious in the home as has been the case 
with school gardening? The present hygienic interest in 
school dietaries will never be vital until the school shows how 
to make kitchen work better. I believe the time is at hand 
when we shall see a great and new wave of enthusiasm for 
the kitchen sweep over the country. If signs do not fail, this 
is likely to involve a change in our very architectural ideas 
of the home as centering in the hearth. Will not some phi- 
lanthropist give us plans of ideal homes, with the kitchen 
made the pleasantest and most attractive room in the house, 
with an ideal equipment for a laundry next, and with both 
these quite equal in, if not exceeding in, attractiveness a 
library or music room, and second in attractiveness at least 
only to the nursery ? House cleaning used to be a great period 
in old New England, full of new interests, a great developer 
of the instinct of order and system, a kind of general review 
of the year. All these and other great topics in this domain 
need a new and different kind of book presentation in which 
their material is set forth in a broader,, more cultural, histor- 
ical, and social perspective and be less busy-work, and this 
would bring out their dignity and their hygienic, moral, edu- 
cational significance that is now for the most part undreamed 
of. The girl in the middle teens who cannot sew and make 
simple things, who would grow dyspeptic or starve if com- 
pelled to live on her own cooking, who cannot launder the 
simple articles of toilet, who knows nothing of caring for 
children and is not interested in them, is a physiological and 
social monstrosity which is too frequent in our day and age. 
Marriage for such girls is prone to end in tragedy for both 
parties. We have, in view of these specimens of our race, 
only the new consolation that nature may very likely design 
a fraction of this, as of our own sex, for single, if not neuter, 
life, and that if nature decrees it, it is somehow, although we 
know not how, for the best. 



698 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

Exasperating as it is to the American feminist tO' be told 
that woman's sphere ' lies in kitchen, clothes, children, and 
church (the four k's of the German — Kiiche, Kleider, Kinder, 
and Kirche), the world is learning again that these are the 
big four, or cardinal, points of the compass in human life, the 
foci of chief interest, without any one of which woman's life 
is a maimed, shriveled, and distorted thing. The world to-day- 
is calling her back to these and anxiously awaiting her re- 
sponse. The kitchen, or hearth, means nutrition. Man is 
what he eats. The struggle for survival is the struggle for 
food throughout nature. Its production, transportation, mar- 
keting, and preparation absorb the life of more than one third 
of the race to-day. Milk, eggs, meat, vegetables, drinks, 
adulteration, purity — these are vital points of culture history, 
the bases of economy, attracting ever more attention from 
academic chairs as domains of applied science. Next to food 
comes clothes, raiment, which also has its psychology, ethics, 
hygiene, and history from the skins of cavemen up to the 
fashion plate magazine. Children, in these days of genetic 
psychology and child study, when the child is seen to be the 
key to the evolution of man, emanate all the studies of eugen- 
ics, sex, population, and heredity, while religion is the mother 
of all science and culture, the first and also the last philosophy. 
With these the life of woman is bound up, and all that does 
not contribute to the better practical knowledge of them is 
of little worth. Back to these should be our slogan. Nothing 
else can ever really interest woman, call out her best powers, 
give her the true rights she now demands, or glorify her sex. 
The future of the race and of civilization is bound up with 
her education on these lines, and I invoke leaders of her sex 
to complete its emancipation by achieving the mastery nature 
intended for her in this sphere. To these themes she can give 
her heart, mind, and will as to nothing else. Despite all her 
new industrialism and all her ambitions and advances in art, 
science, and politics, despite the declining birth rate, the aliena- 
tion of her interest from domestic life, there is no ground for 
pessimism, for, unless all signs fail, the tendencies of the best 
and most insightful women are now back to this abandoned 
trail, and the near future will see the new dispensation of her 
education upon these four foundations. Indeed, the psycho- 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 699 

logical moment seems now at hand when, if a well-selected 
commission of the right women of means and insight would 
study, confer, collate, and then bring out a course from about 
the fourth grade, or earlier, on and up to the bachelor's and 
even the doctor's degree with these four interests always car- 
dinal, it would be a point of departure for a new, better, and 
richer training for woman, that without losing anything she 
has gained in the long thirty years' " war of sex against sex," 
would bring its fruits to a harvest home of all her rights in 
a new domestic, social, industrial world in which her sex will 
everywhere be doing the things it can do best. Such a course 
should be primarily for the large majority who leave early. 
Hence, the essentials should be taught as soon as possible on 
the concentric plan, each grade repeating what had been stud- 
ied before. It should bring together all the many often timid 
fractional, tentative endeavors, but begun in different places, 
should sift, compile, and elementarize with a judicious admix- 
ture of intellectual and practical at each state. A study of 
the prime necessities of life should make poverty more eco- 
nomic and hygienic, and then the course should widen out to 
accessory cultural elements, going up the grades of the social 
scale at the same time and finding and opening every prac- 
tical opportunity at every grade, permeating each with illus- 
trations, concrete cases, visitation, and keeping in touch with 
the actual life of the community, so that the school should be 
life itself rather than mere preparation for it. It is easy to 
indulge in superlatives, but it is probably not extravagant to 
call something like this the chief need of the civilized world 
to-day. At least, let him or her w^ho can name a greater one 
be heard fromt- Doing must be made a vital organ of know- 
ing, and not. as hitherto, the converse. Wherever possible 
the girl must know and do practical things and learn the sci- 
ence and theory of it later. Girls of the higher social strata 
must look and go down to the more elemental simple life of 
the lowly, and girls from the humbler walks must, as they 
advance up the grades, see and know more of the comfortable 
and cultural ways of life. 

I append, with some hesitation, a skit I am allowed to reprint 
from Appleton's Magazine (June, 1909, vol. xiii, pp. 677-683), 
which shows how one representative American citizen was con- 



700 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

verted from the traditional ignorance and indifference of his sex 
toward woman's home work to the greatest respect for it. His 
method of investigation was the only true one, viz., that of scien- 
tific experimental pedagogy. It is the true adventure of a man in 
domestic industry. 

A stalwart, young college professor, a friend of mine, lately 
spent the summer vacation at his home trying to write a book on 
industrial education for girls, a work not yet published. For exer- 
cise, tiring of his wheel, bedroom chest weights and dumb-bells, and 
stupid, solitary walks, and wishing to use his strength practically, 
he lately did a week's washing for his family of six under the 
direction of a laundress, and to her mingled amazement and amuse- 
ment. He tells me he never learned more in the same time, or faster, 
and that neither in the gymnasium, tennis court, or on the golf 
links did he ever get quite such varied hygienic exercise. In the 
splendid freedom of a collarless, cufifless, unstarched shirt, discarded 
and unsoilable pants held up by a belt, and in low slippers, nothing 
more, he went about the day before with a large wash bag gathering 
sheets, towels, handkerchiefs, skirts, napkins, under- and night clothes 
from nursery, bath, and bedroom closets, that the preliminary mend- 
ing might be done. He applied salt and lemon juice to rust stains, 
an especi,al acid to ink, and other things in bottles for grass, berry, 
and other stains, rubbed lard in the greasy places, soft-soaped some 
of the most dirty spots and things, and put everything to soak in 
three set, stone tubs in the basement washroom, keeping the white 
and cleaner things by themselves, and also sawed, split, and laid 
kindling under the big copper cauldron by the tubs. 

Next morning, when the college chimes rang six, he was already 
at his work, with the enjoyable sensation of bare feet a la Kneipe, 
and sleeves up to his shoulders. He had ransacked the college 
library and worried its chief for literature on the subject, only to 
find that no one had ever put together all that needed to be known 
on this subject. Therefore he resolved to assign it as a master's 
thesis to the next girl graduate who consulted him. He suggested 
it to one only, for she told him plainly that she came to college to 
get away from such things, and seemed grieved and almost affronted 
lest it imply he thought her incapable of a loftier career. He told 
her that one of the best commencement parts he had ever seen was 
at the well-known Oread cooking school, where a girl in a mortar- 
board hat, but bare arms, washed one shirt waist and ironed another 
before an audience, telling them at the same time what she did and 
how and why. It was all in vain, for to this the young lady replied 
that she was not seeking a diploma as a washerwoman and would 
die before she would do such a thing in public, and so would all 
the rest. So that settled it. 

My friend ensconced his laundress in a wicker chair in a cool 
corner, near by an open window, to direct. They both agreed that 
Chinamen who sprinkled clothes with water from their mouths were 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 701 

filthy, and that the steam laundry, which used acids and tore off 
buttons with machinery, even if it did make things whiter, was not 
suitable for real Vere de Vere families or for climbers who would 
be true topnotchers. She had also given him nuggets of information 
in a rich brogue about soaps, a kind of lecture so meaty that he 
wished to stop on the spot and note points. From the anatomical 
laboratory my friend had procured a pair of rubber gloves used 
in dissections, but soon discarded these. First he gently punched 
and prodded the soaking mass in the tub with the cleanest white 
things, soaping and wringing a little till his inspectress was satis- 
fied, and transferring everything into the already bubbling cauldron. 
In the next tub it was dirtier. To get down to first principles, he 
had discarded washers and wringers and went to work on the wash- 
board, an imitation of which has been cleverly smuggled into the 
list of gymnasium apparatus under the imposing and euphonius 
classic name of sthenico-dynamo-generator, or chest strengthener. 
This he found an ideal apparatus for the pectoral muscles and those 
of the back and shoulders, combining some of the best movements 
of rowing, parallel bars, and sawing wood. Here, indeed, he felt 
he had found an athletic bonanza. Wringing in whichever of half 
a dozen ways always required the principle of opposition of the 
two forearms and was a distinct improvement upon the hand-wrist- 
twist-weight-lifter of the gymnasium. The clothes lines of white 
cotton, which had been taken in weekly and kept in a bag (for the 
mistress of this house had high ideals of Spotless Town and the 
City of Hygeia), unlike wires, were incapable of staining, and these 
were strung on trees over his hedge-protected back yard. Carrying 
his first tubful, weighing one hundred and thirty-seven pounds, up 
the steps and some eighty feet, he stretched each out symmetrically, 
not without soiling a few, however, which had to go back, hanging 
white garments in the sun and colored ones in the shade, fastening 
each in place with a basket of wooden pins, learning meanwhile 
where they could be bought at ten cents for six dozen. Now the 
trophies of his toil swung like banners in the glorious wind and sun. 
Thus he persisted, keeping woolen garments in successive waters 
of a cool and constant temperature to avoid shrinking, boiling the 
linen and cotton with a tablespoonful of kerosene, a little bluing, 
and just a pinch of salsoda. After three hours, including a hasty 
breakfast, or soon after nine o'clock, his work was done, and he 
had himself photographed, standing before the drapery he had 
cleansed, proud as a huntsman beside his first bear or a fisherman 
with his best catch. At 9.30 a.m. he had taken a cold bath, re- 
dressed, and was at his desk, with a clear head, an exuberant sense 
of well-being, and of having done something, and a bit touched 
with conceit, leaving to his mentor the more unheroic task of bring- 
ing in the wash when it was dry. 

To be sure, his knuckles were a trifle raw and sore, and athlete 
though he was, his forequarters were a little tired ; but he had tasted 



702 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

all the gamey flavor of camping out without a hot and dusty journey to 
get there and back. He almost but not quite resolved that henceforth 
he would always do the wash and not throw away so wholesome and 
inspiring an opportunity for physical culture to be enjoyed by paid 
servants. Now at least no washerwomen's union could boycott him. 
The servant may have dimly felt his thoughts, for as the task went 
on she passed from volubility to taciturnity and glumness, possibly 
fearing that she would suffer from future economy and retrench- 
ment. However, the first act of the drama was successfully ended. 
I wanted to print the above photograph of my friend as he stood 
six feet one, weight one ninety-eight plus before and one ninety- 
seven minus afterwards, deducting his breakfast, which he was me- 
thodical enough to weigh. His modesty, however, forbade me. 
Were he the first woman in the land, he declared, he would have 
been proud to let it appear. He marveled that there was no young 
lady, perhaps just from the high or normal school or college, who 
would not set the world a new fashion, and wondered whether she 
was too coy and shy of the many celibates in search of a wife who 
would chortle with joy and fall at her feet. To think of it seriously, 
why this horror of washing, especially when many society ladies 
confess to me confidentially that they do and love it in a small way 
privately. Schuyten found in a comprehensive census just pub- 
lished that less than two and one half per cent of the girl students 
in the teens had ever wished or planned to devote themselves even 
to domestic life in general, although seventy-five per cent were 
proposing teaching or other culture careers — so little does our edu- 
cational system fit young women for their destiny. How many of 
them to-day ever did or could do a good washing, or have either 
the brain, muscle, or endurance for it? 

Tuesday, again at 6 a.m., my friend was in the laundry cleaning 
and firing the stove, and getting out and polishing the flatirons, and 
preparing three qualities of starch. There was no mangle or roller, 
and all was by hand. In ironing, however, he had to be shown as 
well as told by his teacher, for this was skilled labor, and of a 
very different order. But he was patient and docile and learned 
to avoid tearing off buttons, ripping open-work, making holes with 
the point of his tool, scorching, and got a few points about ironing 
in creases and folds, to tow up well into plaiting, not to rip deli- 
cate tissues, how to use different irons in relays, and to tell when 
each was too hot or cold. At nine o'clock, leaving most of the 
hardest things to his expert, he arrayed himself in the things he 
had ironed himself, even a bosom, collar, and cuffs, and was photo- 
graphed again with his pile of work beside him, which he then 
distributed to their places. Mending he did not undertake yet. 
His courage was still triumphant, but the heat, mental and nervous 
strain had told upon him, and some of his fundamental ideas about 
woman and her work were a little joggled. He became conscious 
of a silent sense of superiority on the part of his employee toward 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 703 

him, and wondered henceforth if it might be harder for her to feel 
all the respect due to the head of the house. Several burns dis- 
tracted his attention from his study, although he had learned and 
applied some valuable recipes new to him which might come handy 
in other circumstances. His six-year-old girl complained at dinner 
that the collar of her white dress scratched her neck and was stiff 
as a board, and the precious pocket in her apron would not open, 
and noticed that his own collar was a little limp and spotted, which 
required him to change it later. His thirteen-year-old girl, in the 
fluffy-ruffles stage, seemed conscious throughout the evening of some- 
thing wrong about the one garment of hers he had attempted, and 
his devoted wife never let him know that many of his chef-d'oeuvres 
had to be starched and ironed over again, and tactfully answered 
his inquiries during the week whenever he saw one of his new 
bits of handiwork in use that all was well, that even the clean 
napkins did not open too hard, and that it was all the style now 
to have them so stiff and pasteboardy that they would stay put and 
almost stand on end. 

What puzzled him most of all was how the laundress, who never 
read a book or an article, and never took a lesson, learned to do 
all these things, for the effects of never-printed tradition and long 
practice were hardest of all for this professor of books to appre- 
ciate. He ransacked his library in vain to find any trace of the 
evolutionary history of this art, or to learn the how, when, and 
where of the precision of the development of the instruments and 
the skill. How accomplishments like ironing could have developed 
in the race and been transmitted for countless generations without 
any of the advantageous aid of print was to him a marvel. Here 
he feared "he must leave a great gap in his book on household arts 
and education. 

Wednesday was cleaning day, and he started off feeling quite 
himself again. First he took all the rugs from the library to the 
yard and beat them well and long, learning to stand on the wind- 
ward side. This, together with rolling and unrolling and carrying 
them, he found capital exercise, as was taking the furniture out 
into the hall. Sweeping was too dead easy, but going over the 
floor on hands and knees with a wet rag set back the shoulders, 
brought out the chest, strengthened the cucullares, complexus, biven- 
ter, and erectores spinse, and many other muscles. Almost nothing 
woman does or can do, he declared, could be quite so hygienic, 
although going over every part of a chair with a dust rag requires 
so many positions that it is a close second to floor scrubbing in 
hygienic value. Dusting the mantel and bric-a-brac and handling 
all the books was careful, puttering work, and in doing this he had 
several lessons as he broke things on the delicacy and deftness of 
manipulation required, and learned a lesson in charity to servants 
who have accidents with ornaments. He also learned much of se- 
quences as well as of patience, and even to marvel at the acuteness of 



704 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

perception of his wife, now his overseer, as she detected spots of 
dust which he had left in the openest spaces as well as in crevices. 
Furniture and picture frames, he declared, should always be plain, 
with no groovings or flutings ; every floor corner should be beveled ; 
there was no use in having so many useless things about merely 
for ornament; windows should never be opened to let in dust, and 
decorated china and everything repousse and in relief should be 
eschewed, and books kept behind glass cases, with rubber-fringed, 
dust-tight doors, with flaps at every keyhole. When he asked his 
wife to mark the grade of his excellence in this morning's work, 
she gravely said that there were three demerits for breakages, that 
he deserved about forty-five for dusting, seventy-five for wet-ragging 
the floor, pointing out his defects, and one hundred plus for rug- 
beating and handling. This ended the third lesson, with many new 
types of physical culture of both fundamental and accessory muscles, 
and new knowledge and viewpoint of women's works and ways, 
which he had seen from the outside before but never till now felt 
or appreciated. He wondered if he ought not to advocate in his 
book that all intending husbands should be required by law to take 
the course he was now giving himself before they embarked on the 
sea of matrimony, a consideration that probably will be amplified 
in his volume in a way that, I think, will command the thoughtful 
attention of -housewives who may read it. He fancied that marital 
ties would be cemented if the lords of creation had acquired such 
intelligent sympathy and appreciation of their wife's responsibilities 
as this experience would insure. 

After these experiences my friend felt an inspiration to take a 
vacation the rest of the week, and the next week his wife and 
children spent with her parents, leaving him alone with the servants. 
Monday morning he resolved to give a stag dinner to eleven of his 
friends, to some of whom he had long felt under obligations. He 
also wished to feel that he could do it alone a la regie. So, after 
a careful inspection of pantry, ice box, and cellar, to note the 
supply already on hand, and having timidly broached his purpose 
to the cook, he started; and after having studied from several 
cook books what courses he wanted, he sallied forth to the market. 
Clams on the half shell with lemons and ice were easily provided 
for; and so was soup with vermicelli and rice, a favorite of his. 
For fish, he wished his guests to have each a good brook trout, 
but found it closed season, with a stringent law well on. But the 
fishmonger told him confidentially that he knew a way to provide 
them at about twice the usual cost, and so he culpably compounded 
with crime and ordered them. A crown roast of lamb with peas 
gave little trouble; but, in providing the ice, which in his judgment 
must have rum, he realized that he lived in a no-license town. But 
here again the grocer knew a way, and again he became a silent 
partner in crime. He had set his heart on partridges, at least half 
a one for each guest; but this the game laws seemed to make 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 705 

improbable, and he could only leave an order to provide them if 
practicable, otherw^ise to fall back upon squabs or snipe with mush- 
rooms. Thus he became thrice a potential criminal. The ice cream 
must be made at home and cast in individual molds, and these he 
had to find to his taste and buy. Nuts, Porto Rico coffee, sweets, 
ginger, Apollinaris, and other minor items were provided, and wines 
he fortunately had. And so he went home, with some complacency, 
after several hours of nerve-racking and mentally fatiguing work. 

But now his real trouble began. The cook absolutely balked, and 
declared she could never prepare all these dishes without the super- 
intendence of the mistress, and that the homemade ice cream in 
individual molds was impossible. He thought, too, that he detected 
in her mind lack of confidence in her ability to prepare the trout 
as he wanted it, and she declared that if she undertook the entire 
task she must have three dollars extra and a helper. Being un- 
willing to apply to his neighbors for the loan of a cook, he set 
out for an intelligence office and learned of an expert, whom he 
at length found in a remote part of the city, who would bestow 
her efforts for the day for five dollars, but must be supreme. To 
this his own cook at first flew into a downright revolt, and re- 
sponded by threatening to bolt at once, bag and baggage. But by 
promising her an extra three dollars, she consented, though with 
no very good grace, to the conditions. The chambermaid agreed 
to serve at the table, as she had often done, but let it be plainly 
seen that she, too, expected to do so for a consideration. He 
wished another table girl in the same kind of black dress, with 
white cap and shoulder-strap apron, and she suggested that a friend 
of hers would be willing to come in for the evening for a proper 
fee, although she had no uniform. She was found, taken to an 
establishment, duly fitted out for eleven dollars and a half, and at 
7 P.M. my friend sat down to his solitary meal, excited in mind and 
body, a real case of nerves which perturbed his sleep with painful 
dreams. 

Happily, he little realized what was before him the next day, on 
which I perhaps ought to draw the veil. So I will not enumerate 
the things found lacking or the orders which came late, or not 
at all, so that sudden shifts had to be made, how his colored man 
and he were subjugated the entire day and kept running by the 
cook. Nor will I describe the friction between the special and the 
stated help; the discovery, when the table came to be laid, that 
several plates and glasses in the sets required were one or more 
pieces short, and the further shifts, trips townward, and purchases 
thereby made necessary; how, when he came to don his tuxedo, no 
clean, broad-bosomed shirt was found save one he had ironed, and 
which it made his very soul groan to wear; how both the trout 
and squabs, for some mysterious reason, proved one short, so that 
he had to decline both rather than let one guest go unserved in these 
courses; how very promptly each invited guest arrived; how long 
46 



7o6 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

the initial wait before dinner was announced, or how long the 
delays between several of the courses ; how anxious he was through- 
out, in contrast to the ease and confidence he had felt when giving 
dinners in which his wife had borne all the burdens he was now 
bearing and given no sign; how light of heart he grew when 
the coffee and cigars were served, and especially when a familiar 
guest praised the perfection of an establishment that could give 
such a dinner; how tempted he was to reveal the fact that he had 
done it all and that his wife was not only not in the kitchen at all, 
but one hundred miles away, and in blissful ignorance of his 
treacherous invasion into her domain. Nor will I describe his feel- 
ings when later he added up the cost of his little dinner per plate 
and compared it with what he might have offered approximately 
the same for at the club. But it was all his own, his very own. 
And it would be easier next time, only this time was quite enough 
for him for the present. But this adventure in domesticity he felt 
sure would outrank all the others in its bitter-sweet memories when 
it came to the olim meminisse juvahit, which was kept fresh in his 
mind during the subsequent days, when his own lonely meals were 
made up of or interlarded with the remains of his sybaritic feast. 

Cooking to him had come to seem the art of arts. Ever since 
Prometheus gave men the control of fire they have been evolving 
this " preliminary digestion," every advance in which sets free more 
kinetic energy for culture and civilization. Good cooking, too, is 
the only cure for intemperance, and bad cooking its only cause, he 
holds. He had studied the chemistry of foods a little and experi- 
mented a little with Fletcherism and the opposite theory, that food 
should be bolted, was a little heretical about the advantages of 
regular meal times, and inclined to the view that eating only when 
one was hungry and what one most wanted was best for the system. 
He tried to teach his children geography a little by telling them 
where each item on their table came from, how it grew, was pre- 
pared for the market, etc. He told them, for instance, of the habits 
of salmon, mackerel, swordfish, and the rest, of Africa and the 
Eastern Islands where spices grew, of slaughterhouses, canning 
meats and vegetables, while grains of all kinds, fruits of all sea- 
sons, birds, every edible variety of meats, even wines and beers and 
all the rest, were texts of informal talks which he had carefully 
prepared for years that the children's appetites might be made ap- 
perception centers for all the botanical and zoological knowledge, 
accounts of processes and localities, that they could be made to 
contain. To this rather unique organization of his knowledge he 
was slowly adding a limited curriculum of cooking, and on this 
theme had accumulated several shelvesful of books and choice recipes 
in clippings. As in the refectories of the old monasteries and 
mediaeval universities a cleric read scripture, litany, hymn, or prayer 
from the liturgy to students at their meals, so my friend discussed, 
at least at their dinner, one or more edibles, and found that from 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 707 

confectionery to common household medicines, stomach and palate 
were great quickeners of the intelligence and were unique fructifiers 
of many-sided interests. His kitchen garden and flower beds at his 
summer home had long been among the best in the vicinity, and 
he spent hours with farmer, gardener, and children, working and 
telling, and insisted on the latter's right to spend as much time as 
they wished in the kitchen itself, which he deemed the best possible 
laboratory for them. 

Plain cooking he knew something of, and Thursday and Sunday 
afternoons, when the cook was out, he with his wife and children 
prepared the evening meal and kept alive the old traditionary feel- 
ing of the hearth as the heart of the home. But there were many 
mysteries of this high art he could never master. Practice and 
study as he would, his wife excelled him here as much as he did 
the children, or as the cook excelled her. He had repeatedly 
invited fellow campers to a meal of his own preparation, but pal- 
atable as his best stunts were, they were few and too little elab- 
orated for any appetite or places save those of the wood and shore. 
Such game and fish as he had taken himself, and chickens, were his 
strong points. On the paternal farm, as a youth, he had learned 
to do many things, and as a student in the laboratory in Germany 
he had taken courses of lessons each of a shoemaker, plumber, glass- 
blower, broom maker, bookbinder, and he set type and carved wood 
a little. But with all his unique and chronic passion for learning 
to do new things, nowhere did he make closer acquaintance with 
more of his own limitations than in this domain, although he had 
for years been a culinary endeavorer. Fancy cooking and the am- 
bition to cater to the loftier heights of gastronomic art, like the 
great chefs some of whom have attained fame through two con- 
tinents, was not in his mind; but never so much, perhaps, as when 
he was invited to partake of meals prepared and served by students 
in cooking schools and departments, for which he had a strong 
penchant, did he so long to " point to higher worlds and lead the 
way " as in this department of household art. He vowed that it 
was his wife's skill in this field that first won his heart, and that 
organ should always be captured thus through the stomach; that 
man is an animal that, like other beasts, best loves his best feeder. 
In season and out of season he was prone to ask even his hostesses 
at their own table what they could and did cook themselves; and 
so strong was his habit that, had he not been naturally so ingra- 
tiating and intrinsically popular, he would have made himself gen- 
erally disliked. He often did thus give offense, though his queries 
were generally regarded as fads or eccentricities of genius, and 
met with laughter and jests rather than with answers. 

Of about everything that the chambermaid, butler, and coach- 
man knew he was already past master, but house cleaning was his 
pet foible. In this avocation, for some two months every spring, he 
found just the physical exercise and mental diversion that seemed 



7o8 EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

most of all helpful for both mind and body. Two or three hours 
a day sufficed. Beginning in his own study and arrayed in suitable 
attire, with every window open, each book was carefully dusted, 
two or three at a time, out of the window, and, shelf by shelf, the 
books of each tier were removed, dusted, returned, and as each 
section was finished covered with a sheet well tucked in. Windows 
were washed, curtains taken down for cleansing and repair, every 
picture overhauled and rehung. Incidentally, too, every book, pam- 
phlet, paper, lecture, book note, letter file, drawer and its content 
were overhauled and arranged in order, sometimes according to a 
new scheme. Wheelbarrow loads of literature were discarded and 
taken to the library or the cremation furnace in it, or to the second- 
hand bookstore, to make room in advance for the accumulations 
of the following year. All this process meant also that everything 
was mentally inventoried, lost treasures found and relocated in their 
proper place, stray and scattered leaflets, manuscripts, letters, clip- 
pings were sorted, fastened together, pigeonholed in the desk, like 
brought to like, to the great saving of time and energy throughout 
the year. This work no other could possibly accomplish, however 
carefully directed, without adding to the confusion. New and im- 
portant arrangements here where most of his working hours were 
spent gave also a unique and most exquisite pleasure, perhaps 
because it placed him in masterful command of all the resources 
in this plethoric room, full of the accumulations of years. Stand- 
ing desk, low table, lounge, reclining chair, drop light, smoking stand 
and all its accouterments, rotary bookcase, cases of drawers for 
cards and for filing large envelopes, writing and reading chairs — 
everything was rearranged, and many petty labor-saving devices and 
conveniences gave a glow of happiness of a hitherto psychologically 
unclassified kind. What was it? At any rate, all this brought him 
nearer to his work, made him more completely master of all his 
resources, and restored actual touch with many things that were 
lapsing from his cognizance, gave a clear and fresh feeling of 
increased efficiency, and made old things seem new. It was some- 
what as if his very brain was undergoing reorganization and resani- 
fication. His thinking could now be more systematic and effective, 
and his whole intellectual nature felt tidied up, cleansed, and 
refreshed. 

Our ancestors, the cave dwellers, apparently never cleaned house, 
but let the debris of broken flint, implements, worn-out mortars and 
pestles, and even garments, to say nothing of bones, shells, and ashes, 
accumulate, living on top of it all for generations, and when the 
cave was full, moving to another. I know old houses in which 
the inmates inherit a similar propensity, and are unable to dispose 
of disused, and even broken, worn-out articles. Old papers, clothes, 
shoes, hats, letters, books, furniture are carefully preserved, per- 
haps relegated to attic, lumber room, or closet, until all are burst- 
ing. " Anything may come handy," and so it is carefully laid up 



INDUSTRIAL EDUCATION 709 

and forgotten. Woe betide him or her who lays destructive hands 
upon it ! Households have been disrupted by this conservative in- 
stinct clashing with that to clean up. One estimable housewife I 
krkow fell into hysterics because in her absence an old chest full of 
rags, samples, remnants, envelopes, clippings was sorted over and 
the worthless part burned on the dump by a husband who needed the 
chest, although she had not opened it for fourteen years. For a 
year after everything she could not readily find she was sure had 
been destroyed in the great holocaust. House cleaning should be 
an imaginary moving, and, painful as it often is to condemn old 
things hallowed by associations, to have once been strenuous in 
this matter often gives " a peace that passeth understanding," and 
which is probably somehow akin to the elimination of waste tissue 
by the agency of a too long neglected bath. To keep lengthening 
rows of old shoes, rubbers, trousers, coats, dresses for years in 
the vague hope of needing them for some outing, or until just the 
right person to use them comes to the door, is a form of psychic 
slouchiness akin to letting the tailings of a mine block its entrance. 
Heirlooms and special keepsakes are different. Yet the moral of 
nature's lesson is iconoclastic. Man needs to molt most such things 
in order that his soul may grow, attain adequate detachment from 
the past, and live more palpitatingly in the present. Nations with 
the longest and most elaborately recorded history, like modern Italy 
and Greece, are not better for that fact, if, indeed, they are not 
impaired by the burden of their memories. This may help some 
at least to explain my friend's passion, amounting almost to a 
mania, for house cleaning. Perhaps, when he is older, he will feel 
differently. But he lately declared that for nearly though not quite 
every old book, the substance of which he knew tolerably well, that 
he expropriated or destroyed, he felt an access of power to master 
the next new one upon the subject. Every old letter file, with, to 
be sure, some exceptions, that he consigned to the wastebasket 
gave new exhilaration, because of the feeling that he would never 
have to look these over and decide their fate again, as he had so 
often done annually, but could now devote the time and energy to 
better uses. The distribution of unmendable furniture relieved his 
mind of the faint but year-long prompting to get it repaired, for 
such a feeling of duty to invalided articles may become almost an 
obsession, and perhaps weaken the character, as good intentions too 
faint to ever prompt action are said to do. For years he had kept 
a long shelf for unbound continental books, part of which was lost, 
in the hope that some time the missing forms would appear; but 
having mustered courage to assign the lot to the furnace, his very 
heart bounded with self-gratulation, a very little as the burden of 
sin is said to fall off the back of the penitent. 

Thus he or she who does not sometimes clean house with his or her 
own hands, does not and cannot feel the full sense of ownership and 
possession of treasures. To be really loved they must be touched, 



7IO EDUCATIONAL PROBLEMS 

handled, moved, furbished, and the more work lavished upon them 
the more they are not only sensed, but loved and treasured. Thus 
the rich do not own their " things " ; they are simply stored with 
them and are ownerless. It is like the case of mothers who have 
borne but never nursed, fed, dressed, or otherwise tended their 
children, so that the latter are really orphaned, though living in 
plenty. It is moral slouchiness about psychic housekeeping akin to 
senescence, which is caused by the accumulation and nonelimination 
of the waste products of decomposition that lets useless things accu- 
mulate unduly, while, conversely, the drastic exercise of the spring 
function brings rejuvenation of spirits and makes and keeps us Hke 
young people who have not yet lived long enough to accumulate 
burdensome impedimenta. 

I have not begun to do justice to my friend's practice or to his 
theories. If I rightly catch his drift, he is penetrated with the 
conviction that woman is in danger of losing respect for and inter- 
est in some of her own most fundamental functions, and he desired 
to see at first hand if these were all so loathsome. He finds most 
of them exhilarating and peculiarly hygienic. He is not conceited 
enough to think that his solitary example — and solitary enough it is — • 
or his precept when his book appears will set her again upon her 
lost trail. He fears she is abandoning her glorious kingdom, and 
that so set is her determination to follow man that she will return 
to her own only if he leads the way. He is able to find, experi- 
enced as he is in athletics and in varied industries and handicrafts, 
nothing quite so wholesome for body and soul as doing precisely 
what woman is now turning her back upon. He holds, too, that no 
housewife can possibly have washing, cooking, cleaning, etc., well 
done by servants who has not learned how and actually done these 
things well herself, whether she be a millionaire or a professionally 
married woman, helping her husband outside the home to support 
his family. He would find and make in domesticity new centers 
for the education of girls and women, and holds that it would not 
be less, but more purely cultural than present methods. But, as a 
lady professor in his own college remarked, " though he is a good 
fellow, he is a queer Dick, and the bats that have domesticated them- 
selves in his belfry seem to be a new species, though they are prob- 
ably harmless." 



(1) 



MAY 9 »9" 



One copy del. to Cat. Div. 



